News from the Center for Security Policy

No. 97-D 79

(Washington, D.C.): The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled this afternoon to complete work on legislation intended to reorganize and streamline the institutions responsible for formulating, conducting and explaining the Nation's foreign policies. Long a priority of the Committee's chairman, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), this initiative received critical momentum when -- as part of the Clinton Administration's bid to secure Senate approval of the controversial Chemical Weapons Convention -- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright agreed to eliminate several bureaucracies and consolidate their responsibilities in the State Department.

Among the entities expected, until recently, to be subordinated to State's managerial and budgetary control -- and inevitably, therefore, to its policy dictates -- is the Broadcasting Board of Governors. This organization was created in 1994 to oversee the range of U.S. government and government-supported international broadcasting operations. The former (i.e., the Voice of America, Worldnet and Radio and Television Marti) are currently run by the U.S. Information Agency.

Importantly, the 1994 legislation recognized the necessity of preserving the bureaucratic and editorial independence of the latter (i.e., Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia) -- a feature deemed critical to the ability of such "Freedom Radios surrogate broadcasting Radios" to attract and retain their respective audiences. During the Cold War years, this feature of "surrogate" broadcasting (affording access to accurate news and other information to populations denied it by their own, communist-controlled media) was assured by an independent Board for International Broadcasting.

But for the leadership of Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), now the Foreign Relations Committee's ranking minority member, the Freedom Radios would have been a victim of the naive notion that -- with the collapse of the Soviet empire -- such surrogate broadcasting no longer was needed and could not be justified as a government expenditure. At the time, faced with intense pressure from Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI), who made terminating the Freedom Radios a personal cause célèbre, and in the absence of appreciable support from Republicans, the best Sen. Biden could do was to provide a stay of execution for the Freedom Radios: a new institutional arrangement that more closely tied them to USIA and that set arbitrary timelines for eliminating government subsidies to RFE/RL and the national foreign language services they provide.

Changed Circumstances

It has become increasingly apparent in recent years that, if anything, the post-Cold War world is one in which U.S. interests require increased capability to provide factual information to the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East in a form that is not discounted by the audience as propaganda put out by the mouthpieces of the American government. One painful case in point has been the Balkans, where control of most information sources by totalitarians bent on aggression and genocide contributed greatly to the popular support for ethnic cleansing. It is nothing less than tragic that U.S. government policy toward the former Yugoslavia prevented Radio Free Europe from broadcasting to that region in Serbo-Croatian at a time when the truth may have undercut the sense of grievance on which the likes of Slobodan Milosevic relied to justify and sustain his war machine.

A similar opportunity beckons today: The recent, overwhelming defeat in Iran of the candidate of the fanatic clerics is proof that the people of that long-suffering country are yearning for an end to "Islamic" tyranny. What they largely lack, however, is information that makes clear that such change is not only necessary but possible; that freedom-loving peoples elsewhere support this goal and are willing to do their part to help -- at a minimum, through the dissemination of news and analysis which both encourages and equips the growing opposition to the Iranian government. This could be easily and cost-effectively accomplished via the creation of a Radio Free Iran service providing broadcasting, ideally, in Farsi, Arabic, Kurdish and Balouchi via the organizational structure and equipment of Radio Free Europe.

(In fact, such an effort should be just one part of a larger U.S. government effort to facilitate the emergence of unified democratic opposition to the extremist Iranian theocracy. In this connection, Congress would be well-advised to provide government support comparable to that going to private institutions engaged in such democracy-building efforts elsewhere to the Foundation for Democracy in Iran -- an organization that has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to forge a common front among various Iranian religious, political and ethnic constituencies to work for change in their homeland.)

The Clinton Administration's signaling that it sees in the election of a relatively "moderate" Iranian cleric as "hopeful" evidence that change is afoot in Tehran, however, underscores the importance of keeping surrogate broadcasting as far away as possible from the State Department. That is the only reliable means of mitigating the danger that the U.S. government's policy du jour (for example, one that indulges yet again in the absurd delusion that Iranian "moderates" who operate in a government under the thumb of radical clerics is one with whom the United States can safely do business) will constrain the flow of factual news and pro-change/pro-democracy editorials and analyses from reaching the people of Iran.

The Bottom Line

The State Department reorganization legislation affords an important opportunity to enhance one of the most powerful and least expensive instruments for promoting freedom around the world: surrogate broadcasting. Senators Helms and Biden are to be commended for their bipartisan efforts to put the Freedom Radios and other instruments for international broadcasting on a footing that continues -- and builds upon -- the enormous progress made to date by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in reducing its costs while significantly increasing their reach and influence. To do so will require both institutional independence from the policy-making apparatuses of the U.S. government and a continuing commitment of public funding for the operations of the Freedom Radio.

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