Austerity suicide: Greek pensioner shoots himself in Athens

The government had “annihilated any hope for my survival and I could not get
any justice. I cannot find any other form of struggle except a dignified end
before I have to start scrounging for food from rubbish bins,” the note said.

Within hours of his death, an impromptu shrine with candles, flowers and
handwritten notes sprung up in the tree-lined square in the heart of the
city.

One note nailed to a tree said “Enough is enough”, another asked “Who will be
the next victim?” while a third said “It was a murder, not a suicide.”

The elderly man killed himself as hundreds of commuters streamed out of a
nearby metro exit during Athens’ morning rush hour.

Costas Lourantos, the president of the pharmacists’ union in the Attica
region, said he met the man several years ago and remembered him as quiet
and dignified.

“When dignified people like him are brought to this state, somebody must
answer for it,” said Mr Lourantos. “There is a moral instigator to this
crime – which is the government that has brought people to such despair.”

He said the pensioner had “sent out a message to the world” about the plight
of Greece.

Greece’s fifth consecutive year of recession has been worsened by drastic cuts
to public services, pensions and salaries and higher taxes, which were
introduced in response to the demands of the International Monetary Fund and
the European Union in exchange for financial bail-outs.

One in five Greeks are unemployed, depression is on the rise and there is a
growing feeling of despair across the country.

The government said last year that suicides had increased 40 per cent over the
previous two years.

The high-profile suicide came a day after 78-year-old Italian woman threw
herself from the balcony of her third-floor apartment in protest against a
cut in her monthly pension from 800 euros to 600 euros.

The pensioner, from the town of Gela in Sicily, was reportedly worried about
how to make ends meet.

“The government is making us all poorer, apart from the wealthy, who they
don’t touch, in contrast with us workers and small businessmen who are
struggling with heavy debts,” said her son, Bruno Marsana.

Her death came a week after a 58-year-old businessman tried to commit suicide
by setting himself alight while sitting in his car outside a tax office in
Bologna in northern Italy.

He was apparently protesting against the rejection of his appeal against a
claim for unpaid tax.

The fire left him in a critical state and he was rushed to hospital for
treatment of extensive burns all over his body.

A day later a 27-year-old Moroccan immigrant set himself on fire in protest at
not being paid for four months.

The construction worker doused himself in petrol outside the town hall of
Verona, also in northern Italy. He too was treated in hospital for horrific
burns.

His self-immolation was a “symptom of the utter exasperation felt by the
weakest employees,” said Vincenzo Scudiere from the CGIL trade union,
Italy’s largest.

The technocrat government of Mario Monti, the prime minister, is attempting to
force through an ambitious package of spending cuts and reforms to balance
the budget by 2013 and stem fears that Italy could go the way of Greece.

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