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A 77 year-old man, Dimitris Christoulas, committed suicide Wednesday on the main square of Athens. For Greek daily Ta Nea, by shooting himself in the head in front of passers-by, he sent a "message of despair through a very public suicide". In a state of shock, many Athenians gathered at the square to express their sympathy and their support for an act seen as a political action of protest against the austerity measures imposed by the Troika – the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.
Ta Nea, however, recuses all political co-opting and publishes a front page cartoon with a man in the process of killing himself accompanied by the following dialogue:
"I can't stand it!"
"What can't you stand, Gramps?"
"To see what you will say on what I am about to do!"
For his part, the leader writer of daily To Ethnos, Georges Delastik, says that the man —
was not mad. He took his life in order to have a decent end and to not sink into starvation. It is not a suicide, it is a murder. He explains this in a letter describing the dictatorship imposed on his country which slaughtered him. Today, pensioners are forced to beg or to hunt through garbage pails.
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