Why monks set themselves on fire

Hours later, says Voice of America , the man died in the hospital with burns covering his body. At least 82 of the self-immolators have died. The string of self-immolations, says the Atlantic , has drawn international attention to the on-going protests in the region.

That attention, writes Lois Farrow Parshley , has resulted in a crackdown by Chinese officials on suspected dissidents. The act of self-immolation not only triggered the current political crisis in Tunisia, which ousted the president Jan.

It also inspired copycat self-immolations across North Africa, who attempted this very sensational form of suicide as statements of their own desperation and frustration with the authoritarian regimes in their countries. The latest count of protesters who have set themselves on fire in North Africa is up to eight, with four in Algeria, two in Egypt and one in Mauritania, as well as Bouazizi's act in Tunisia.

Legends of people of committing the act of self-immolation date back centuries. The first instance is said to come from Sati, one of the wives of the Hindu god Shiva. According to myths, she married against her father's wishes and then burned herself to death after her father insulted her husband.

This story is often linked to the practice of sati , which was a custom in some parts of India where a widow would burn herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. The practice was outlawed in India in History through the ages in various parts of the world is lined with tales of female spouses, consorts and concubines being consigned to the flames, often against their will, to join some deceased warrior king or chieftain. The first and most famous moment of self-immolation as agitprop was that of Thich Quang Duc in On 26 April this year Omar Masoumali, a year-old Iranian refugee in detention on Nauru, set himself on fire.

He died two days later. Less than a week later another detainee, Hodan Yasin, also set herself alight. The year-old Somalian asylum seeker remains in hospital with serious injuries. According to Oxford University sociologist Michael Biggs, the history of self-immolation as a modern protest tactic begins on the 11 June in South Vietnam.

It stopped in the middle of the street,' Biggs sayss. Some other monks poured petrol over him and then he set himself on fire and burned to death while sitting in this position.

It was an act of protest over discrimination towards Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. Importantly, it was organised as a spectacle and was deliberately intended to attract the attention of the media. And many foreign journalists present because of the Vietnam War did witness the event. But of course his action, because it was so unexpected, because it was so dramatic, because it was so terrible, then got the attention of the world, particularly through the iconic image taken by Malcolm Browne,' Biggs says.

While a suicide bomber unequivocally intends to harm other people as well as taking his or her own life, the suicide protester is committing a more ambiguous act. Simanti Lahiri, a political scientist at Villanova University in the USA, says that when people utilise this kind of protest they tend to talk about it in terms of non-violence. Tibetan and Indian students from Delhi University hold pictures of Tibetans who self-immolated protesting Chinese rule.

According to Lahiri, suicide protest also treads a line between being regarded as committed or crazy, and this depends, to a large extent, on how social movements or organisations talk about the act afterwards.

Biggs says there is the Buddhist belief in renouncing the body and transcending its limitations when a stage of perfection is reached.