It's happened again. On 27 April a suicide bomber in Damascus stood in close proximity to both a school and a mosque, and detonated the explosives in his belt. At least nine people died and 30 were injured.
Philosophers have always had a lot to say about what might be called private suicide. While Nietzsche remarked ironically that the thought of suicide can get one through many a long night, Wittgenstein considered that suicide was the pivot on which every ethical system turns, because it is life's central issue. Albert Camus agreed that suicide was the one serious philosophical problem in that it poses the question as to whether life is worth living; he went on to suggest that suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art.
Suicide is as individual as the person who attempts it: some people simply reach a depth of despair so great that they relocate to another space where they cannot be reached. The threat of suicide can also be coercive: many people make attempts, but never complete the act, often because the so-called cry for help has been answered.
And then there is suicide as public protest: the newspapers of my youth featured pictures of Buddhist monks self-immolating in Vietnam more often than I care to recall.
I am very muddled on the subject of suicide, both private and public. Like many people, I have tended to think suicide bombers are either madmen or irredeemable religious fanatics buoyed by enticing visions of Paradise. Not so. Flinders University maintains a Suicide Terrorism Database, and has kept records since 1981, yet there is no discernible pattern, except that most such suicides are completed by young men.
Religion may play a part, but politics, a sense of humiliation, altruism and a desire for revenge are more important. Also a sense of desperation and impotence, pride, anger and a local tradition of resistance. Such suicides are coercive and strategic, a bizarre exercise in public relations in an attempt to deal with injustice.
Again there are the individual examples. What are we to make of the suicide of Dimitris Christoulas? On 4 April this 77-year-old retired pharmacist took up his position near a tree in Athens' busy Syntagma Square, near the metro station; the Parliament building is clearly visible across the street. At 9am, when crowds of people were on their way to work and to the shops, he took out a handgun and shot himself in the head.
He was an activist who had often attended the protests of the Greek Indignants, and his only child, a daughter, said his death was consistent with the way he had lived. He'd left a Can't pay, Won't pay notice outside his flat, and said in his suicide note that he could not survive further cuts to his pension; thus he was ending his life before he had to start scouring the garbage skips, a practice now common among the poor of Greece's cities.
One witness maintains that Christoulas said he was not committing suicide, but was being killed by politicians. His angry note added that he was sure the youth of the country would one day rise up in armed revolt and go on to hang the traitors in Syntagma Square. He'd have taken up arms himself, he had written, but he was too old.
Perhaps Christoulas' death was both a private solution to his anger and despair, prepared within the silence of the heart, and a public gesture that had the drama of a posed work of art. He killed no one but himself, and like a true Greek exercised his rights as he saw them: he had no time for formal religion, and took his life within a culture that has always stigmatised suicide. At the same time his death could hardly have been more public.
While thousands attended Christoulas' civil funeral, politicians reacted with suitable contrition. George Karatzaferis, leader of LAOS, went so far as to say that 'we have all pulled the trigger.' He may well be right.
Gillian Bouras is an Australian writer who has been based in Greece for 30 years. She has had nine books published. Her latest, Seeing and Believing, is appearing in instalments on her website.