you see everything (but I don't)

[intertribal]

I'm getting ready to write a story about self-immolation (what a great opening line that is) so I've been doing a lot of research on that, but I hadn't run across this.

At my internship I'm making this enormous insane database of internal conflict/collective violence in Indonesia since the beginning of the year, with columns like "# Houses Burned" and "Types of Arms Used" and "Army Deployed?" (you would be alarmed by how much of it there is), and this requires reading lots and lots of Indonesian newspaper articles that pertain, even vaguely, to the topic.  The latest one, an argument that these small conflicts are beginning to threaten national security, mentions Sondang Hutagalung, a 22-year-old law student (son of a taxi driver) who self-immolated a few months before his planned graduation in front of the Palace of Independence as part of a campaign against government corruption/graft:

From here (note the picture):

“Time for change, remember Tunisia, dissolve the legislature,” Rakrian Yoga said in his Twitter feed, alluding to the death of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi from self-immolation, which sparked the Tunisian revolution that led to the ouster of the country’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Bung Karno University will grant an honorary bachelor’s degree to him. 

“A number of public figures and organizations suggested granting the honorary bachelor’s degree,” university deputy rector Daniel Panda said on Sunday in Jakarta as quoted by tempo.co.  He added that the granting of the degree should not been taken as encouragement for other students to do the same thing. 

“As an academic, I hope there will be no repeat of such a measure. There are other options. This is a too high a sacrifice.”

I had no idea that such things were happening in Indonesia - it is not a "tradition" here (see here).  We burn buildings and get shot by the military, but political suicide is not a thing.  I suspect the "remember Tunisia" line is key.  You always wonder about precedent though (in May - in an apparently completely unrelated, random incident - a 69-year-old Dutch citizen self-immolated in front of the Dutch embassy in Jakarta, but he apparently thought that the police were in collusion with the Balinese mafia and trying to chase him).  It is interesting also that Sondang was a devout Christian who always accompanied his mother to church.  A couple months later his girlfriend tried to kill herself out of personal grief, by overdosing on anti-malaria pills in front of his grave. 

This song was playing on my iTunes while I was reading about this:

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I do think people take inspiration from far afield/from things that seem relevant, and these days you can *hear* about things people do all over the world really easily. You get suicide attacks in places where there's no tradition of political or religious martyrdom because (well, the "because" is just my understanding of it, but) it's recognized as a tool that can be used in asymmetrical conflicts.

Also, self immolation is like the ultimate statement of the intensity of your feelings. . . a guy self-immolated in the next-door town from us, on the town common, in protest over the first Gulf War.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's amazing the kinship that can be felt by people who are involved in completely unrelated asymmetrical conflicts, simply because they must both "climb the mountain of conflict" (In The Loop reference).

Yup. I find it really, horribly fascinating as a phenomenon, and I'm also always intrigued by people's responses to it.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What spectrum of responses do you see?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Man, it's crazy. I have spent hours reading the comments section on articles about self-immolation (particularly in Tibet). Some people like to blame some behind-the-scenes leader who must have been orchestrating the whole thing (i.e., the Dalai Lama). Many people seem to feel that the person who self-immolated was crazy, deluded, or an idiot. American pundits tend to take this position - "the poor fool, what good did he think that would do? Tut tut." No one comes out in favor of it, obviously, but some are more empathetic than others. Many people blame religion. A few really consider it to be an evil action, either because of norms against suicide or because they think it's one small step from here to suicide bombing innocent by-standers.

Probably because suicide is a sensitive subject for a lot of people, and political protest is a sensitive subject for a curiously large number of people as well.