News & Events in Belarus

MINSK, 6 August (BelTA) – Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is against creating a society with a gap between the rich and ordinary people in Belarus. The President made this statement as he received Prime Minister Andrei Kobyakov with a report, BelTA has learned.

Alexander Lukashenko noted that Belarus has set out very basic tasks in the economy. "The first task is to sell what we produce. Not to store the products at warehouses or take them somewhere for consignment storage. I have even involved the special services to keep these things under control,” the President said.

“I have been forced to do this because our government, its individual members, and officials have started to report on the production figures ignoring some other things. Ok. You produced your goods, but where did you sell them? And not even that is important. You can sell wherever you want. The most important thing is money. Where’s the money?” stressed the head of state.

Alexander Lukashenko noted that this problem should be solved this year by all means. "We should meet the goals that we have set for ourselves, and address these very basic tasks. We should do our best to keep labor groups in place. I see how some managers behave. They forget that tomorrow they will be retirees themselves and will probably need protection. We need to deal with problems in a humane way,” said the Belarusian leader.

"As for the conceptual suggestions, I do not want to create a bourgeois or a bourgeois-democratic society where there will be a gap between the rich, the business, or government officials and so on and ordinary people. This gap will necessarily lead to scandals as minimum, and revolutions as maximum. We have already been there. The society will be destabilized, and maybe we will repeat the Ukrainian scenario, and maybe even without external interference,” said the head of state.

He warned the government against the far-out proposals which are difficult to implement. "We need the proposals that will allow our people to live normally today and tomorrow," he said.

"I have seen many states go through such reforms and the consequences of such reforms. Some part of our society wants reforms, something like 1 million jobs. But no one thinks that jobs are needed tomorrow to sell products. And there’s another moment: where we will get this one million people for one million jobs? You know these are populist slogans. And secondly, to create a million jobs will require $10 billion and possibly more. After all, these must be the jobs to create good products,” said Alexander Lukashenko.