Businessmen`s strike ends to no avail :: Charter'97 :: News

National strike of Belarusian vendors took place February 28 in Minsk. Its organizers claim that the action was a success. Meantime, no perceptible results have been achieved, just as it was the case with most of their protests of the recent past. Many leaders of business trade unions accused the Committee for strike`s leadership of intriguing and desire to use people`s problems for their own political benefit.

The strike`s organizers declare that the event attracted over 160 thousand entrepreneurs and retailers throughout the country. Over 90% of all businessmen of Grodno region and Grodno city were on strike; 70% in Minsk, 60% in Minsk region; 80% in Brest and Brest region; around 60% in Vitebsk.

The strike has been launched upon the initiative of the Committee for strike and was aimed at forcing the government to reduce the size of the fixed duty and dismiss the current chair of the State Committee for taxation.

However, loud statements of the strike`s initiators are denied by the information, emanating from regions. For instance, private businessmen, trading at the Vitebsk region flea markets refused to go on strike. In a conversation with the BelaPAN correspondent deputy chair of the trade union committee of the "Smolensky" commodity market (largest in Vitebsk) Tamara Yunevich stressed that on February 28 all regional markets functioned as normally:

"Businessmen don`t want their problems, that occur due to the anti-market policy of state, to be used as a spring board for certain impostors. Moreover, we are convinced that these impostors are playing a double game, helping the authorities to find out our activists and neutralize them in future."

Similar things can be said about the rest of the regions.

The strike revealed that private entrepreneurs no longer have confidence in the Committee for strike`s chair Valery Levonevsky. Levonevsky has numerously stated that he would run for the presidency this year. In his reports he oftentimes criticizes democratic forces, rather than the government, with which "one can always reach a deal".