The newsroom is dark. The microphones are off. The broadcasts were silenced. Publication is suspended. On social networks. On our websites.
Due to uncertain funding, Radio Free Asia is not broadcasting news to its audience for the first time in its history.
For RFA journalists who have sacrificed so much to challenge powerful and malevolent forces, this is an excruciating moment. And make no mistake, authoritarian regimes are already celebrating the potential demise of RFA.
When West Germany’s Uighur journalists first exposed the violent repression and mass detention of Uighurs in Xinjiang, China harassed and arrested their family members. Yet our journalists courageously continued their work of uncovering the atrocities. With the closure of the world’s only independent Uyghur-language news service, Chinese propaganda will fester without strong and effective accountability.
Without RFA’s Tibetan journalists, China’s campaign of forced assimilation and erasure of Tibetan culture and language will be underestimated. The same will apply to the Chinese regime of intimidation and repression of pro-democracy activism in Hong Kong, which RFA’s Cantonese journalists regularly expose to the risk of their own security. Without RFA Mandarin, WHYNOT and Asia Fact Check Lab, independent reporting and fact-checking in the most widely spoken Chinese dialect is severely diminished.
Without RFA’s journalism in Vietnam, where at least four RFA contributors remain imprisoned, the communist regime has a total monopoly on information disseminated to more than 100 million people.
In Myanmar, where later this year the military government holds elections long promised and widely condemned as a sham, no RFA Burmese journalist will examine the junta’s promise of a free and fair vote. These journalists were honored this month with two national Murrow Awards for their excellent reporting.
Without RFA Korean, 26 million North Koreans isolated by the repressive regime’s war against free speech and a free press will not have access to independent information. RFA’s Korean journalists were recognized earlier this year at the 50th Gracie Awards for their reporting on North Korean escapees.
RFA Lao journalists have denounced the perils of the rush to build dams on the Mekong. They also reported the alarming rise in the number of teenagers trafficked to scam centers in Myanmar, which the United Nations has described as an epidemic of human rights exploitation, forced labor and torture. The absence of RFA’s journalism curtails this courageous reporting in Laos, where criticism of the authorities can lead to long prison sentences.
It was RFA’s investigative unit that exposed the forced labor scams perpetrated by the Prince Group. This month, the United States and the United Kingdom imposed drastic sanctions against the Cambodian conglomerate, labeling it a transnational criminal organization. Without our investigative journalists, the schemes that authoritarian regimes and corrupt organizations work to cover up will likely remain hidden.
RFA Khmer journalists, including those who have told the heartbreaking stories of survivors of the Cambodian genocide, have worked tirelessly to expose persistent corruption and cronyism within Cambodia’s authoritarian government. In response, the regime declared two of our journalists “hostile to the state,” a broad legal designation used to suppress dissent, and deployed its army of online trolls to harass our journalists on social media. Even in the face of coordinated intimidation, RFA’s Khmer journalists never capitulated. Without their reporting, Cambodians are losing out on the blatant violations of basic human rights perpetrated by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.
When the first funding cut earlier this year forced RFA to furlough the majority of its editorial staff, the handful of journalists who remained launched RFA Perspectives, determined to fulfill RFA’s congressionally mandated mission of providing accurate, uncensored reporting in parts of Asia hostile to a free press. This program will also end.
Independent journalism is at the heart of RFA. For the first time since RFA’s founding nearly 30 years ago, that voice is under threat.
We still believe in the urgency of this mission – and in the resilience of our extraordinary journalists. Once our funding is restored, so will we.
Stay tuned.
Rosa Hwang
Editor-in-chief