BELARUS PRESIDENT WANTS CONSTITUTIONAL REVISION.

The deputy chief of Belarus president Aleksandr Lukashenko’s staff, Aleksandr Abramovich, let it be known yesterday that Lukashenko plans to propose constitutional revisions and submit them to a national referendum. The revisions are meant to empower the president to dissolve parliament in certain situations and to reflect the mandate which Lukashenko claims to have received in the May 1995 referendum, in which voters supported closer ties with Russia. Abramovich proposed that deputies cooperate in setting up a commission to draft the amendments and revisions to the constitution. (13) The intent to revise the constitution may be linked to last week’s decisions made by Lukashenko and Boris Yeltsin in Moscow on an accelerated integration of the two countries. The Belarusian parliament may pose an obstacle to such plans as many deputies support Belarusian sovereign statehood.

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