Belarus entrepreneurs strike :: Charter'97 :: News

Thousands of entrepreneurs all over Belarus went on strike in a bid to protest laws stifling small business, the strike`s leaders said overnight. Over 35,000 people joined the one-day action on Thursday to support 36 businessmen who went on hunger strike in Belarus`s north-eastern town of Vitebsk last week.

Vitebsk authorities prompted the hunger strike by upgrading the status of local markets and shopping centers, thus stepping up small business`s tax burden, leader of the entrepreneur union Perspectiva Leonid Malakhov said.

"The buying ability in the provinces is very low, so businessmen can barely scrape by, and even a small increase in spending will mean bankruptcy for them," Malakhov explained.

"They went to this extreme out of despair," he added.

The wide-spread strike had Belarus`s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko call on Vitebsk authorities to compromise with the hunger strikers, who "may be right in some things."

"If we allowed them to trade, that means we have taken on responsibility for these people," Lukashenko told Vitebsk administrators.