Goodness, is it not those “repressive regimes” who “deny citizens press freedom” and “freedom of expression”? Regarding Syria, in April, France’s Foreign Minister Alain Juppé trumpeted that sanctions were having the “desired effect.” The oil embargo, sanctions on the Central Bank had caused staples, including flour to rise by 50%. Heating oil costs, a winter essential was set to soar. Fresh from their Nobel triumph, the EU strangled further, banning all flights by Syrian Arab Airlines to or from EU airports and freezing the Airline’s assets. The financial oxygen of two-way trade was thus virtually switched off. The value of both the Syrian Pound and the Iranian Rial have roughly halved. The last paragraph of the 2012 Nobel statement reads:
The work of the EU represents ‘fraternity between nations’, and amounts to a form of the ‘peace congresses’ to which Alfred Nobel refers as criteria for the Peace Prize in his 1895 will.
A piece of fantastical nonsense to join history’s most memorable. Taking the EU, if “fraternity between nations” means enraged riots across the “union” caused by measures of austerity imposed by a body whose accounts have not been signed off by the Court of Auditors for 17 years, we live in even stranger times. In Greece, which had the lowest recorded suicide rate in Europe, desperation through job losses, subsequent deprivation and homelessness is setting it towards being suicide central, with occurrences “skyrocketing.” In Athens in June alone there were 350 attempts and 50 deaths, with such deaths rising across the country. More than 2,500 people have taken their own lives since 2010. Psychiatrist Dr Dimitris Boukouras, who mans a psychiatric hotline that rings off the hook every day, said:
This is the number for confirmed suicides. We think the real number is much higher.
Desperation is such that experts believe some are ending their lives “in an act of ultimate political protest.” In April a 77-year-old pharmacist shot himself on Syntagma Square in downtown Athens as did Dimitris Christoulas, People have hanged themselves in public, set alight to themselves in public, and died in numerous other ways in the privacy of their own homes. A note in red letters on a piece of cardboard pinned on a memorial to Dimitris Christoulas reads:
The government has annihilated all traces for my survival, based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid into for thirty five years with no help from the State. I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life so that I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.
[ED NOTES:JUST CITING FEW EXCERPTS,CLICK LINK FOR WHOLE PIECE..
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