Yesterday, former Cambodia Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, expressed his support and assessment for the decision of US President Donald Trump to reduce federal funding to broadcasters funded by the United States, including Radio Free Asia (RFA).
In an article on his Facebook page accompanied by photos of himself with Trump taken at an Anase summit in the Philippines in 2019, he praised the American president “to have the courage to lead the world to fight against false news, starting with the information networks funded by the American government”.
“This is a major contribution to the elimination of false news, disinformation, lies, distortions, incentives and chaos in the world,” he wrote.
On March 14, Trump published an executive decree listing the American agency for the world media, which finances media, notably RFA and Voice of America (VOA), as among “the elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president determined are not necessary”. The White House said that the cuts would guarantee that “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”. Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Effectiveness of the Government of the Administration of the Administration, has already written media organizations funded by the United States: “It is simply radical to make crazy to talk to each other while burning $ 1 billion / year of American taxpayers.”
The closure of these points of sale, which also include RFE / RL, a diffuser serving East Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East, was largely condemned by journalists and human rights activists, including Cambodia. For years, RFA and VOA have in depth a wide range of corruption and human rights issues in the country, both in Khmer and in English.
Their importance has only increased over the past decade because Hun Sen and his successor, his eldest son Hun Manet, have taken measures to eliminate independent contradictory journalism within the country. In September 2017, the government forced the closure of Cambodia Daily, one of the two newspapers belonging to foreigners who were created under the auspices of a UN peacekeeping mission in 1992-1993. The second of these newspapers, the Phnom Penh Post, was sold under the constraint to friendly Malaysian investors in May 2018. VOD English, who filled the vacuum left by these losses, was closed in February 2023.
While RFA was forced to close its office in Phnom Penh in September 2017 and was prevented from being accessible in Cambodia in July 2023, IT and VOA continued to report on the country from their editorial rooms in Washington, DC
Hun Sen’s response reflects the broader enthusiasm of Asian governments that have long opposed the efforts to promote American democracy. In an article on X yesterday, a large military propaganda account of the Myanmar considered that the closure of VOA and FRG would end the “years of foreign propaganda which fueled the disorders and weaken national unit”. He added: “put an end to their influence opens the way to stability, cohesion and stronger domestic media in Myanmar”.
It is not surprising that this account is also dizzy in his response to the effective closure of Trump on the USAID, claiming that she would undermine exile media organizations, “politicians who claim to be refugees” and “the so-called democratic terrorist revolution” disputing his grip on power.
The effusive response has also extended to China, where the Global Times, supported by the State of China, published an editorial which described VOA, with an obvious relish, like “a factory of lies”.
“The so-called flagship of freedom, VOA, has now been thrown by his own government as a dirty cloth,” he said.
All these responses reflect the curious way in which the Trump administration, seeking to transport institutions which he considers as bastions of leftist “radicalism”, deprived the United States of many institutions which strengthen their power and its influence in the world. (The real political left has tended to see the USAID and the media like VOA, as well as organizations promoting democracy such as the National Democratic Institute, as figures of the American imperial power.)
At this stage, it is not clear if these institutions are only collateral damage in the administration war against the federal bureaucracy and the sprawling network of liberal NGOs supported by federal funds, or part of a conscious attempt to forge a new international order based on the delimitation of spheres of influence between the United States, China and Russia. Admittedly, if the administration wishes to follow a pressure policy and contain China, as did the Biden administration, the decision to close RFA and VOA, which has made voluminous reports on Chinese human rights violations (in particular against the Uighurs of the Xinjiang region) would seem counterproductive.
In any event, the more this attack against the institutions of influence persists, the more the probability that the administration has in mind something closer to the second darker scenario.