After 29 years, RFA is on pause

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The newsroom is dark. The microphones are off. Broadcasts have been silenced. Publishing is paused. On social media. On our websites. Due to uncertain funding, Radio Free Asia is…

The newsroom is dark. The microphones are off. Broadcasts have been silenced. Publishing is paused. On social media. On our websites.

Due to uncertain funding, Radio Free Asia is not delivering news to our audiences for the first time in our history.

For RFA journalists who sacrificed so much in defying powerful and malignant forces, it’s an excruciating moment. And make no mistake, authoritarian regimes are already celebrating RFA’s potential demise.

When RFA Uyghur journalists first exposed the violent repression and mass detainment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China harassed and arrested their family members. Still, our journalists bravely continued the work of uncovering atrocities. With the world’s only independent Uyghur-language news service shuttered, China’s propaganda will fester without a potent and effective accountability check.

Without RFA Tibetan journalists, China’s campaign of forced assimilation and erasure of Tibetan culture and language will be underreported. As will China’s regime of intimidation and suppression of pro-democracy activism in Hong Kong, which RFA Cantonese journalists regularly exposed at great risk to their own personal safety. Without RFA Mandarin, WHYNOT and Asia Fact Check Lab, independent reporting and fact-checking in the most widely spoken of all Chinese dialects is severely diminished.

Without RFA 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 is staging long-promised elections largely condemned as a sham, there will be no RFA Burmese journalists scrutinizing the junta’s promise of a free and fair vote. Those 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 on free speech and a free press will lack a critical…

RFA…

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