The Independent/Amol Rajan: Paying the price for an idiotic economic experiment
My girlfriend and I turned up for a romantic break in Athens last Wednesday evening, only to discover that Dimitris Christoulas had shot himself in front of parliament hours before. The 77-year-old pharmacist couldn't cope with the austerity imposed upon him by Greece's technocratic government. His suicide note confessed he couldn't bear to look his children in the eye any more. Massive demonstrations in the central Syntagma Square over the next four nights were his fellow citizens' response. A terrible suffering has been unleashed upon the Greek people as a result of the Euro crisis, and the fiscal incompetence and corruption of the previous Greek government. The leaders of the richer, more powerful European nations, especially France and Germany, have imposed a bureaucrat called Lucas Papademos on the broken country, and demanded cuts to public spending, whose human toll Christoulas has now come to symbolise. Pay and pensions have been debauched; taxes have risen very