Burning with conviction

A group of Iranian exiles - angered at what they see as their homeland's tyranny and fundamentalism - have shocked the West with the ultimate form of protest. Arifa Akbar talks to the activists who have decided that martyrdom by fire is the only way for their voices to be heard

Eleven days ago, about 150 Iranian protesters gathered outside the French embassy in Knightsbridge, London. It seemed, at first, much like any other demonstration: flags were waved, drums beaten, slogans shouted. Then one protester rushed forward from the crowd, chanting. His clothes were wet, and he was carrying a cigarette lighter. One witness thought he was trying to light a cigarette. Then, still chanting, the protester set himself alight, and his petrol-soaked clothes burst into flame.

The man in question, Mohammad Vasoogh Imani, 46, is a sympathiser of the left-wing coalition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and was just one among 10 Iranian exiles who have turned themselves into human torches across Europe since police raided the NCRI's office in Paris on 17 June and arrested more than 100 people. Eleven key members remain detained for suspected terrorist associations and financing, including Maryam Rajavi, the woman the group believe should be Iran's next president.

Two of these protesters became martyrs to the cause, including Neda Hassani, a 25-year-old Canadian who had been visiting London, and Sedigheh Mojaveri, a 40-year-old woman in Paris. The other eight survived but incurred horrifying injuries.

Imani suffered 35 per cent burns, which left him immobilised and bandaged from head to foot. But he has no regrets. In the burns unit at Broomfield Hospital, Essex, Imani remains impervious to his agonising condition and raises two bloodied fingers to form a victory sign.

"I was ready to be a martyr, to sacrifice myself in order to protest at the arrest of Rajavi, who to me, is a symbol of freedom against the tyranny of the Mullahs in Iran," he says. "I told no one that I was going to do it because I knew they would try to prevent me. I felt this was the way to pass on my message to my own people, to Europe and to the world."

Friends who witnessed Imani's protest hail him as a hero. One Iranian woman spoke of the "sublime spark" that entered his eyes at the point of ignition. It was as if his death-wish became transparent only in that instance, she said.

On the day he decided to set himself alight, Imani wrote an open letter to Jacques Chirac, addressing the French President with his grievances "in the last moments of my life".

Following her arrest, Rajavi made an explicit plea against self-immolation, but her followers have nothing but praise for this extreme form of protest. "Those whom we lost, we have not actually lost. They are alive in our hearts. I heard about others who had done it before I chose to do it and I admired them. I thought they were heroes. There's no doubt their actions had an impact on me," says Imani, a former political prisoner in Iran.

But what goes through the minds of those who immolate themselves in this way? How can anyone willingly condemn themselves to such agonies? And what is this organisation on whose behalf they do so?

Heshmat Zandi, the first of this wave of "human torches", is recovering from 40 per cent burns at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital after setting himself on fire on 18 June - also outside the French embassy. The 38-year-old mechanical engineering student from Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, echoes his comrade's readiness for death: "I did what I did consciously when I heard our leader had been arrested. I felt I had no other choice. I did not think twice; the regime and its accomplices had gone so far. They were going to sacrifice us all and I had to do something."

Two days after Zandi's televised protest in London, Ali Ghassemi, 43, a father of three sons who had fled Iran as a political refugee in 1989, was visiting Rome from Denmark when news of the Paris raid was broadcast. He went to a local petrol station to prepare for his death.

Lying in Rome's central hospital with 30 per cent burns to his back, chest and hands and anticipating his second skin-graft operation, he says he did not regret the action he had taken. "I tried to sacrifice myself to show my anger to the French government. My wife and three children were proud of me when they heard what I had done. My eldest son, who is 21, is on hunger strike in Paris now in the same protest."

All three protesters insist that their decision to take such action was made of their own volition and not through organisational pressure. As educated Iranian exiles who enjoyed the privileges afforded to the higher echelons of Iranian society under the Shah, who was toppled in the 1979 coup by the clerical Islamic Republic, they deny that theirs was the act of "brainwashed pawns", as detractors have suggested. They also reject comparisons made with disaffected teenage suicide bombers in the Palestinian Hamas movement.

"The resistance movement is 'live' as a result of this protest action. The action has already led to the release of so many who were arrested. Be sure, nobody can do this by order of an organisation. You cannot set yourself alight for a group. I know, I have been through it. The difference between me and the Islamic fundamentalists is our point of view. I chose to set my life on fire, not someone else's. I am conscious of what I have done and my reasons for doing it. What the fundamentalist does is based on fanaticism; what I want for Iran is democratic freedom," Imani says.

Opinion among Iranian exiles is divided on both the internal machinations of the NCRI and the ethics of a protest that involves suicidal tactics. The NCRI, comprising more than 500 member groups, acts as an Iranian parliament in exile. It has as its largest member the People's Mojahedin, which operates from military camps on the Iraq-Iran border and is a proscribed group within the UK, and features on the US and EU state lists of terrorist organisations.

Maryam Rajavi, who is married to the NCRI's leader Masoud Rajavi, was subject to an exclusion order in October 1997, which banned her entry to the UK on the grounds that the organisation contained a large faction of terrorists. The Foreign Office said at the time: "We have decided her presence in Britain is not conducive to the public good."

Dr Ali Ansari, an expert in the history of the Middle East who is based at Durham University, says that while the NCRI had been a popular group after the revolution, with the ability to draw thousands of protesters to the streets, it has become increasingly insular and sect-like since its leaders fell out with the Mullahs in 1981. Ansari adds that the NCRI, led by a charismatic husband-and-wife team, is viewed by many as run as "a cult of personality".

Massoud Shadjareh, the chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, who gave evidence at a privy council select committee on terrorism in June, regards the NCRI as indistinguishable from the terrorists in the People's Mojahedin, which is estimated to have a 30,000-strong army.

He expresses doubt that the suicide bids lacked a pre-planned, co-ordinated element, and alludes to the dangerous grip that the organisation has on its sympathisers.

"I cannot believe it was done individually and without planning," says Shadjareh. "It is an extremely organised group which, unfortunately, has people who are willing to take extreme action to the extent that they ignite themselves to safeguard their leader. How can we confuse this with the right of people to seek democracy?"

Ali Safavi, a NCRI spokesman, says that attaching a terror tag to the resistance movement is unfair and objectionable. The organisation lays a heavy emphasis on democracy and women's equality, choosing a female president to spearhead the democratic process, he points out. The raid on the organisation angered NCRI members, who regarded it as a conspiratorial move by the French authorities to mollify the fundamentalist regime in Tehran. "Ten people decided to take drastic action on their own initiative because they felt there was no other recourse than to demonstrate their abhorrence in this way,' says Safavi.

Laila Jazayeri, director of the Association of Iranian Women in the UK, and a NCRI supporter, thinks that the personalised concern for Mrs Rajavi's welfare was not misplaced when viewed in its cultural context. "A lot of loved ones died chanting the name of Rajavi in Iran. Now they are arresting the very person for whom these people chanted and died for." To regard the human torches as fanatics, reminiscent of medieval Islamic martyrs, amounts to a gross misunderstanding of Iran's revolutionary history, she believes. "The people who are protesting like this for Mrs Rajavi are the cream of Iranian intellectual society. They are setting their lives ablaze against fundamentalism and barbarism."

Yet critics insist that while the emotionally charged actions of the human fireballs may have granted the group a transient degree of attention, it was no effective means for achieving change and it distracted from the greater motives behind the month-long protests that took place last month to mark the crackdown by the Islamic Republic in June 1981.

Arman Farakish, of the Iranian Civil Rights Committee, says that while his campaign to move the reformation process forward in Iran was laborious, he believed this pace of change was more effective than shock protest. He had already worked with Amnesty International and the European Union to attain a moratorium on the stoning of woman in Iran, a result which was achieved through tireless lobbying.

But Safavi deems the moratorium a superficial appeasement to the West; stoning still occurs, but no longer in public. From his viewpoint, the situation in Iran has reached such a degree of brutality that evolutionary, peaceful reform is redundant. Using President Kennedy's words to justify the Mujahideen's continued presence within the NCRI, he says "when we make peaceful change impossible, we make violent change inevitable".

The human torches should "serve as an example for the people of Iran, that there are those who are willing to give everything to prevent Iranians and their freedoms from becoming the bargaining chips between Tehran and its Western interlocutors," he adds.

And as one poignant example, Imani shows no waning of commitment. "We will protest until the end. We will protest until Mrs Rajavi is released," he says from his hospital bed. And dismissing the daily agonies he suffers in Rome, Ali Ghossemi concurs, chanting the refrain: "Viva, viva Mrs Rajavi."