More Than Two Thousand Employees Dismissed From Ministry Of Internal Affairs Of Belarus

The scale of the staff drain is staggering.

In the third quarter of 2020 (from July to September), 1,074 people were allegedly fired from the Interior Ministry. This is 51.4% of the total number of employees, who were fired from agencies during the first 9 months of last year (2091 in total).

This is the figure quoted by Euroradio with reference to the BYPOL initiative. It refers to a document marked "For official use", allegedly compiled by the head of the coordination and cooperation of departments of personnel and ideological work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Police Colonel Aliaksandr Mazur. The document provides an analytical overview of the situation of human resources and work with human resources in the Ministry of Internal Affairs for 9 months of 2020.

It also presents the staffing number of certified employees of internal affairs bodies. As of October 1, it amounted to 46,128 people, not including civilian personnel and conscripts of the Internal Troops.

Analysis of the data given in the document also gives an idea of the staffing number of individual units:

- high-tech crime detection units - 163 persons;

- Criminal Investigation units - 2,457;

- Drug control and anti-trafficking units - 550;

- subdivisions for combating economic crimes - 886;

- Police precinct inspectorates - 3,036;

- Traffic Police - 3,341;

- Operational-duty service - 1 112;

- Militia Patrol and Checkpoint Service - 2,099;

- Main Department for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption - 360;

- Department of Corrections - 5,427;

- Department of Protection - 11,505;

- Educational institutions - 729;

- Internal Troops (excluding conscripts) - 6,716.

There was a sharp decrease in crimes involving personnel, 28 (120 in the same period of 2019), the decrease amounted to 76.6 percent, as well as administrative prosecutions, 841 or 41.7 percent (1,443 in the same period of 2019), and breaches of service discipline, 2,599 or 25.9 percent (3,509 in the same period of 2019).

These figures, BYPOL notes, are the lowest in the last 10 years, which indicates not a positive trend, as stated in the document, but that the Ministry of Internal Affairs since the beginning of the year established a tacit ban on bringing employees to various types of responsibility in order to preserve the staff core against the background of mass dismissals of employees (currently, this prohibition is fixed in the order of the Interior Ministry of Belarus of 18.08.2020 № 6 "On stabilization of moral and psychological climate and retention of the staff core").