Immolation: Is He Hero or Showoff? : Iranian’s Startling Act Stirs Exiles

“It is a lie to say that I am not afraid, or to claim that my goal is martyrdom. But . . . like every responsible person of the Third World, I know that he who has not suffered death does not know life.”

--Neusha Farrahi

Paradoxically, now that strangers finally want to know what Neusha Farrahi has to say, he lies in silent agony with deep burns over 70% of his body. A respirator and medication keep him from speaking. No one can say for sure if he will survive.

Outside his room in County-USC Medical Center, in the large Iranian community here and in similar communities around the world, his name is being invoked. Neusha Farrahi, martyr. Neusha Farrahi, showoff.

The 31-year-old leftist intellectual made headlines last Sunday when he took the stage at a demonstration in Westwood and made a once-in-a-lifetime bid to make himself heard above the routine political chants.

“Death to the monarchy!” he shouted. “Down with the Islamic Republic!”

Then he set himself on fire.

A leaflet Farrahi had written for the demonstration reflected his Marxist politics, but not the intense young man of letters who carried out the political self-immolation.

“By setting fire to myself I am not only protesting the presence of the Iranian butcher, Khamenei, to the United Nations,” he wrote in reference to the visit to the United Nations of Iranian President Ali Khameini, “but also President Reagan’s ultra-right foreign policy as well as the poisonous activities of pro-monarchy elements. . . . “

Farrahi’s action shocked his family and resounded through the Iranian exile community. Many of the estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Iranians in the Los Angeles area share his profound hatred of the regime of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

But self-immolation is not in the Persian tradition. In fact, Shahid, or suicide for the good of the nation, is a concept used by Khomeini to send thousands of young men to their deaths in the war against Iraq.

Farrahi’s act has prompted hundreds of telephone calls and letters to local Iranian media. Because the story was broadcast into Iran by the Voice of America, some of the responses have come from inside that country.

“The first reaction of our listeners was, ‘My God, he must be crazy!’,” said Iraj Gorgin, who established Los Angeles’ first Farsi-language radio program, Omide Iran (Iran Hope).

“And then the second day, as people began to think about what he had done, there came great sympathy, even from political enemies of his. I am not a supporter of his because he is a leftist. But I respect his courage. He has become some kind of martyr, a symbol to all of us.”

He is symbolic, Gorgin and others explained, of those who decry the more than 6,000 executions that Khomeini’s regime has acknowledged since the 1979 revolution. Amnesty International estimates that the actual number of executions may be “some multiple” of that figure. Most are political and religious opponents of the regime, as well as drug users and women adulterers, some of whom are stoned to death.

But, although Iranian exiles almost universally hate Khomeini, some hate each other even more. They are divided roughly into two groups: monarchists who supported the late Shah, and leftists and others who helped overthrow the Shah only to find that their allies, the Islamic mullahs, had turned against them.

Farrahi signed his leaflet with the logo of a splinter Marxist group called the Fedaie Guerrilla Organization. The group gained international attention three weeks ago when its members, unarmed, seized the Iranian Embassy in Norway.

Many Touched by Act

Iran News, a weekly magazine here that represents the monarchists, acknowledged that many of its readers had been touched by the act. But, it said, others questioned its authenticity because Farrahi brought a fire extinguisher with him hidden in a blanket. It was found by his supporters and used to extinguish the fire within a minute or so.

“There are a lot of people who think it was a showoff protest,” said a magazine spokesman who asked not to be named.

Perhaps the most phone calls came to Rayagan, a Los Angeles weekly of about 10,000 circulation edited by Farrahi’s father, Farhang Farrahi. The elder Farrahi, 53, was formerly a city councilman in Teheran and one of Iran’s best-known radio commentators. Although he disapproves of his son’s leftist views, he shares his hatred of the current regime.

They have continued to live together, in Old World fashion, in Tarzana with Neusha Farrahi’s mother, Galoria, and younger brother, Payam, 21, and are by all accounts a very close family.

Payam Farrahi explained that his father, unable to turn back the clock, turned instead toward editing a special edition of his paper with responses from around the world so “the fire that Neusha set will not burn out with the flames.”

‘Hope for the Future’

One letter Rayagan published came from a renowned painter whose name was not given because he remains in Iran. “The news came through Voice of America and it shook all of us,” the letter read. “It means you (exiles) are awake and that you offer us hope for the future.”

Asked how he coped as a father with his son’s self-immolation, the elder Farrahi paused and answered in an unsteady voice.

“Neusha’s outcry is the scream of thousands of people all around the world, a genuine scream to express the moral outrage of this regime,” he said. “I am constantly in conflict with my feelings as a father. Yet I am so happy that someone had this courage that sometimes I almost forget he is my son.”

According to his brother Payam, Neusha Farrahi studied painting in Florence and art in London. He came to Los Angeles in 1977 and dabbled in literature and film courses at UCLA.

The family owns a bookstore, the Khaneh Ketab Iran (Iran House of Books), on Westwood Boulevard. The store makes little, if any, money, but serves as a cultural center for anti-Khomeini Iranians.

Farrahi’s cultural palette is broad. He quotes Walt Whitman and the late Nobel-prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as readily as the martyred Iranian poet called the Red Rose.

Not ‘Out of Touch’

“I was very surprised at this incident, but not that he would be the one to do it,” said Paul Appel, owner of the Wilshire Pacific Gallery next door to the bookstore. “He is very intelligent, very sensitive and passionate, and cares very deeply about certain political issues. I would call anyone who sets himself on fire a fanatic, but Neusha’s not, well, out of touch. He has a wonderful sense of humor and he’s always been very generous in giving help to anyone who needs it.”

Appel and other Americans described Farrahi as something of a dilettante, a man who aspired to being a great literary critic and film director but who has yet to attain more modest accomplishments.

But to his family and political allies, he has done exactly what an exile of conscience is supposed to do: live and breathe his politics, and put forth his beliefs in his writings. By all accounts, Farrahi and others of his political beliefs denounce terrorism and avoid violence. Instead, his friends said, he believes strongly that it is the duty of intellectuals to nurture revolution.

Friends said that he is not a member of many organizations, but that he made a point of contributing to Iranian political publications and frequently attended public demonstrations.

A night or two before his action, Farrahi wrote a personal and more thoughtful letter in Farsi than the political denouncement in English that was distributed at the demonstration.

‘Full of Life’

“I’d like my friends and family to know I am full of life as I write this,” it said, describing the music he was listening to, the poetry he was reading, and the love he had for his girlfriend and his mother. It was in this letter that he said he would accept death if it came, even though he said he does not believe in an afterlife.

Perhaps no one is more affected by the self-immolation than Payam Farrahi, who watched in agony as the older brother he idolizes set himself on fire. Even more than his father, Payam understands his brother’s politics.

Asked to explain what he believes had motivated his brother, he recalled a series of events which, in retrospect, he thinks may have played a part.

Farrahi, like many other exiles, felt that the Iran- Contra affair indicated that the Reagan Administration was on the verge of recognizing the current Iranian regime, Payam said. He had begun reading an Iranian feminist journal and was increasingly outraged as the Islamic Republic began encouraging public stonings of pregnant unmarried women.

Most recently, he was impressed by the actions of Brian Willson, who three weeks ago lost his legs during a protest demonstration when he was run over by a train carrying ammunition at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in the Bay Area.

And perhaps most important, he said, was the visit of the president of Iran to the United Nations earlier this month. The visit, the first time a top-ranking Iranian official has visited the United Nations since the 1979 revolution, infuriated many exiles because, they believe, it gave credibility to the regime.

Brief Exchange

The brothers exchanged only a few words before the burns began taking their full toll.

“I am glad to be able to look at you,” Farrahi told his younger brother. He added that he now knew the agony of people who had been bombed in wars around the world with chemical weapons.

Five nights later, Payam Farrahi found a tape recording that his brother had left in case he died. On it he read a passage from Whitman’s “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire.”

When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,

And when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth,

Then only shall liberty or the idea of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth,

And the infidel come into full possession.