By Enver Robelli
The American president is shutting down international radio. For dictators, this is good news. But for the author of this text and his father, a well-known world is shaking.
It was always important for my father to return from the construction site to the apartment before 6:00 p.m. At that time, we lived in a quiet village near Lake Zurich. He would quickly climb the stairs and first take a shower to remove the dust from his body. Then he would cook something – “spaghetti, quickly and well.” He would say this sometimes in German, sometimes in Albanian.
At 6:00 PM we all had to be quiet. Because that's when the Voice of America news would start. We would listen to it in Albanian, then in Serbo-Croatian. We couldn't miss a word. Not a single piece of news. The voice of freedom echoed from Washington. Every day, several times.
Around a Philips shortwave radio – my father says it was a Grundig – other men would gather, all migrant workers from a country that in the 1980s was called Yugoslavia. They all lived in that concrete building near the forest, which until a few years ago was listed in the telephone book as the “Freienbach Migrant Workers’ Home.”
American international radio was a reliable and accurate source of information about the great terror and the small tortures in the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe. The Voice of America reported on opponents of the regime ending up in prison. It exposed the five-year plans of the red swindlers. It honored the resistance of dissidents like Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa. A playwright from Prague and an electrician from Gdańsk kept the torch of hope burning. And we listened attentively – not only to the news, but also when Frank Sinatra sang “Ever Homeward” in Polish to support the peoples in the fight for freedom against the Soviet Union.
Voice of America news reports described priests who had been executed or imprisoned by the communist regime in Albania. One of them was Ernest Simoni Troshani, who miraculously escaped the death penalty. Today he is 96 years old. He was arrested on Christmas Day 1963 after celebrating a mass for the assassinated American President John F. Kennedy, also a Catholic.
Communist apparatchiks sentenced the priest to 18 years in prison. When he left his cell, the dictatorship had not yet fallen. During the day he cleaned sewers. At night he secretly preached to workers. When this small man told his story to Pope Francis, he burst into tears and named him a cardinal.
Since Saturday, March 15, the Voice of America has stopped broadcasting news. The moderators’ voices have been silenced, the websites have been frozen, and journalists have been told to stay home. With an executive order, US President Donald Trump decided to disband the United States Agency for Global Media – the parent agency of the Voice of America. These massive cuts put an end to the work of perhaps the most successful radio station of freedom in US history.
The White House announced that the Voice of America had spread “radical propaganda.” No evidence was provided for this, but we live in a time when fake news often outweighs the truth. Thus ended the 83-year history of the Voice of America.
A radio that for decades was cursed by communist dictators and enemies of humanity because it brought the truth to light. A radio that the Soviet KGB could not destroy. A radio that contributed to the fall of dictatorships in Eastern Europe. A radio that broadcast news in 50 languages to about 400 million people worldwide. Until March 15. In one of the latest news stories, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was quoted as saying that Russia will have to accept peace in Ukraine – sooner or later.
Peace. Freedom. Democracy. Prosperity. Freedom of expression. All of these concepts entered our family through the Voice of America. It was 1958, when my uncle, who had earned a little money as a bricklayer in southern Serbia, bought an Iskra radio and brought it to our village in Kosovo. The radio was manufactured by a factory in Slovenia. From there, along the border with Austria, to near Thessaloniki in Greece stretched the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia – a “socialist paradise,” as its ruler Josip Broz Tito called it. It was a dictatorship, but not as brutal as those in neighboring countries like Romania, Bulgaria, or Albania.
In the Voice of America news, listeners were encouraged to write to the Washington office to tell them where they were listening to the broadcasts. One day, my father took a blank piece of paper and wrote a letter to the Voice of America. He told the editors that he enjoyed listening to their news. After a while, the postman brought a letter from the capital of the free world. A letter of thanks from the Voice of America! This may have been one of the happiest moments of my father’s life.
On March 15, a familiar world collapsed for him and me. A love story ended. Donald Trump destroyed it. Even though his wife comes from Slovenia – the same place where the Iskra radio was produced, with which my family discovered America. Iskra means “spark.”
What Stalin in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European dictators failed to do for decades, the American president did with a black pen. Today’s autocrats in Russia and Belarus, the ayatollahs in Iran, the communists in China, the dictators in Africa, the despots in Central Asia, and the corrupt politicians in the Balkans now have reason to celebrate. The Chinese Communist Party newspaper, the Global Times, happily declared that “American international radio has been consigned to the dustbin of history.”
With his decision, Trump not only banned the Voice of America, but also the Prague-based Radio Free Europe (RFE), which was also funded by the US. RFE reported excellently and in detail, especially from Ukraine.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) will also no longer broadcast news in Mandarin, Uyghur, and Tibetan. RFA journalists have reported for years with deep knowledge on the brutal repression of Uyghurs, arbitrary arrests of dissidents, and other injustices in Asia.
"RFA does an extraordinary job in extremely difficult conditions in this region - especially in Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia. We refer to this radio," wrote BBC correspondent Jonathan Head on the X platform. Head reports from Bangkok on developments in Asia.
On Trump's orders, some 1,300 journalists have been placed on paid leave. What remains is an information vacuum in countries where there is no freedom of speech. Both during the Cold War and in our post-facto era, radio stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe have been a thorn in the side of authoritarian regimes.
These media outlets cost American taxpayers about 370 million francs a year. It is not a lot, considering that these information channels have spread American values of democracy and freedom more effectively than armed battalions. We remained loyal to these radio stations because they reported honestly and independently on developments in the Balkans.
Katarzyna Pisarska, founder and director of the Warsaw Security Forum, openly expressed her concern on Platform X about the shutdown of American international radio stations. “In April 1986, my parents learned about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster from Radio Free Europe, while the Polish communist regime was hiding the fact that a radioactive cloud was passing over Poland,” she wrote.
Thanks to a radio station funded by the US government, many children behind the Iron Curtain were less exposed to radiation – “and our societies created access to the truth that the communists tried to hide.”
Even today, Pisarska says, Radio Free Europe – founded in 1953 – is heard by 40 million people in 23 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In Russia, the radio station has been declared a “foreign agent” since 2017, along with Voice of America. After the start of the full-scale aggression against Ukraine, the Russian authorities also blocked the websites of both media outlets.
But there are still millions of Russians who watch RFE/RL programs, bypassing state censorship. Voice of America and RFE/RL are indispensable sources of information in Putin's empire of unfreedom. The US is now giving up one of its most important tools of soft power.
Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 was quickly broadcast to the Soviet Union's satellite countries thanks to Radio Free Europe. It became known that Khrushchev called Stalin a criminal and strongly condemned his brutal purges.
The Voice of America began broadcasting on February 1, 1942, in the midst of World War II. “We bring you voices from America,” journalist William Harlan Hale said in German. “Today and every day from now on we will tell you about America and the war. The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we will tell you the truth.”
When I asked my father what the closure of Voice of America meant to him, he blurted out an unquotable word. Then he said, “Write better: It’s a disaster.”
(This article was published on March 21 in the Swiss newspaper "Tages Anzeiger". Subsequent developments regarding the future of American international radio stations are not taken into account in the text). (A2 Televizion)
