LONDON - Bulgaria’s caretaker government will launch a plan on Monday to try to tackle an epidemic of suicides that is afflicting the impoverished eastern European nation.
In the past month, six men have set themselves alight in apparent protests against the country’s economic plight.
There are also daily reports of people hanging themselves, jumping from bridges and high buildings and throwing themselves under trains, according to the Sofia News Agency, a Bulgarian wire service.
The latest victim of self-immolation succumbed to severe burns on Friday, two days after dousing himself with gasoline on a village soccer field in northern Bulgaria.
Before he died, Todor Yovchev, 40, reportedly told doctors, “I‘m jobless and cannot feed my child.â€
The first of the protest suicides coincided with demonstrations last month against rising electricity prices, corruption and worsening living standards, which forced the resignation of the center-right government led by Prime Minister Boiko Borisov.
A 36-year-old man who set himself alight in the Black Sea city of Varna, hours before the government quit, has emerged as a symbol of the protest movement.
Plamen Goranov, a photographer and rock climber, has been compared to Jan Palach, the Czech student who set himself alight in the center of Prague in 1969 in protest of the Soviet invasion of his country.
Mr. Goranov, who lingered for 12 days before dying of his wounds, had told 30,000 demonstrators in Varna that corrupt local officials linked to organized crime were responsible for the country’s plight.
The self-immolations also recall the protests of Buddhist monks during the Vietnam War and, more recently, the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose death in December 2010 is regarded as the catalyst for the Arab Awakening.
Other, more anonymous suicides in Bulgaria have been linked to economic desperation in a country where the average monthly wage is just $480, the lowest in the European Union, which Bulgaria joined in 2007.
Demonstrations, which were violently suppressed last month, have resumed, despite the interim government’s promise to take steps to improve the incomes of pensioners and of the one-in-four Bulgarians who live below the poverty line.
Patriarch Neofit, the newly enthroned head of the country’s Orthodox Church, has decried the wave of suicides and told Bulgarians, “Do not take your life under any circumstances. There are other ways to solve problems than through monstrous death.â€
However, as my colleague Matthew Brunwasser reported from Sofia this month, the Church’s authority is overshadowed by its past links to the old Soviet-era regime and its continuing alleged links to corruption.
The interim government, for its part, has announced a strategy to identify people at risk. Experts will provide people with information on how to identify symptoms of depression in their relatives and will seek to contact those who are most severely depressed.
Miroslav Nenkov, deputy health minister in the technocratic government that is running the country until elections in May, cautioned that the suicide prevention campaign should not be expected to yield immediate results.
Others were also skeptical about the impact of appeals from the government and the Church.
Danail Danov, a Sofia university lecturer, told Voice of Russia radio, “I’m not sure how this will go down because the number of desperate people in the country is really high, which is pushing people towards these extreme acts.â€
