BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

29/09/2006

Belarus must set up far-flung "foreign policy arc" - Lukashenko

MINSK. Sept 29 (Interfax) - Belarus will be building "a foreign policy arc" far from its borders, President Alexander Lukashenko said at a meeting with Russian regional media outlets in Minsk on Friday.

"After we have normalized and built warm relations with our neighbors, we want to build a more distant foreign policy arc," Lukashenko said.

"The Caribbean, Venezuela, South Africa, the Persian Gulf area, China, Malaysia, Vietnam - this is a perimeter within which we need to act to sell our products and arrange trade and economic relations," he said.

Lukashenko also described as politically important a Belarussian delegation's participation in a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana in September.

"The Belarussian economic model is incompatible with the models that the high-and-mighties of this world offered us through the IMF and the Soros Fund," Lukashenko said. "They immediately rushed here" in the early 1990s, but "I said right away that I would not pursue a mass privatization policy," he said.

Pointing out that the Belarussian economy is growing 9%-10% a year, Lukashenko said, "we have set up a socially-oriented economy, which is focused on the individual and his salary."

Source:

http://www.interfax.com/3/198139/news.aspx

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