After Myanmar’s earthquake, a cornerstone of democracy lies amid the rubble.
The shifting of tectonic plates – both real and geo-political – destroyed the former offices of Radio Free Asia as a free press is up against seismic forces.
Amid the vast devastation of the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that rocked Myanmar last Friday, there is one specific pile of rubble that offers a global metaphor for the destruction of a cornerstone of democracy.
The collapsed chunks of concrete, twisted steel and shattered glass from what was once a two-story building lay in a heap at the epicenter of the quake in the capital of Naypyitaw in this Southeast Asian country, formerly known as Burma. More than 3,000 people have been killed by the quake and the death toll is still rising.
This flattened building was once the office of Radio Free Asia, and it stood as a beacon of hope from the United States where independent journalists were able to tell the story of the country through its Burmese Service and where the idea of a free press as a cornerstone of democracy was a concrete reality.
Now that cornerstone is smashed.
And it is worth stepping back to look at the forces – the shifting of tectonic plates both real and geo-political – that would reduce it to rubble, a seismic shift that started long before the earthquake. A jarring political shift occurred when Radio Free Asia’s offices were first shut down by Myanmar’s military junta after the coup of 2021, which dashed the hopes of a fledgling democracy movement.
The coup plunged the country back into a civil war that is still ongoing and that is hindering aid to the quake-ravaged regions. To make matters worse, likely there won’t be any impactful relief effort spearheaded by the United States Agency for International Development, which was gutted by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE.)
Any distant hopes of Radio Free Asia reopening someday have been ground from rubble down to dust by the Trump administration, which also announced the defunding of this and other news organizations as part of a concerted assault on independent media around the world.
On March 15, Trump drastically cut funding for the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the administrative and funding umbrella of U.S. international reporting and broadcasting services, such as the Voice of America (VOA,) Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe.
As Radio Free Asia reports on its website, which features a warning label that its reporters are doing the best they can to try to cover the earthquake amid the looming funding cuts in Washington, hundreds of staff have been placed on unpaid leave. Both VOA and RFA are congressionally mandated so Trump’s executive order is being challenged as a breach of the Constitution and legal challenges are underway.
Radio Free Asia has long delivered uncensored, objective news to and about countries like China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It has been an effective instrument of U.S. soft power and a key player in the dissemination of information particularly to distressed regions and struggling ethnic minority groups within those countries.
While the pot of polarization boils in America around questions of funding and legal separations of power, tightly controlled state-owned media in oppressive Southeast Asian countries and China are cooking up more effective strategies over how to win in the information war. Independent news organizations, which were given life in Myanmar through USAID, have been shut down and journalists have been locked up or forced into exile. Radio Free Asia was a critical player in this news ecosystem, providing accurate and balanced coverage of issues that would normally be censored or severely restricted by state-controlled media.
This emphasis on the standards of what was always considered an American value of journalism earned both outlets the ire of more repressive regimes throughout the region. That is, until the Trump administration began joining the forces of authoritarian regimes, like China and Russia, in crushing those voices of dissent.
Meanwhile, the bizarre alliance of Trump, Russia and China is succeeding in portraying these outlets as mouthpieces for “U.S. propaganda,” according to Russia and China, and “globalization,” according to the Trump administration. Those false characterizations have created a negative association that has proven hard to shake.
The funding cuts have slashed RFA’s staffing by 75 percent; meanwhile, 1,300 VOA employees were also placed on leave. With the defunding of RFA and VOA, the U.S. finds itself ceding more and more ground to China and Russia, which are both more than eager to fill the void left by a U.S. foreign policy that is unpredictable and increasingly incoherent.
Perhaps that is why the shutdown of the outlets was greeted with praise from Chinese outlets, like the state-backed Global Times which has bombarded the internet with a barrage of rhetoric decrying VOA as a “lie factory” and Radio Free Asia as “malicious” toward China. Former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen praised closure of the VOA and Radio Free Asia, citing both outlets as significant contributors to fake news, disinformation, distortions, and accusing the news agencies of inciting chaos.
Back in 2013, when the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar was gaining momentum, we led a GroundTruth fellowship program that brought together 20 emerging journalists - 11 from Myanmar and nine from America – who came together to produce a special report titled “A Burmese Journey.”
In this fellowship, we saw the incredible idealism of this new generation of truth tellers and their commitment to the principles of journalism. The group had a chance to meet with Aung Sun Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate who was being hailed at the time for her resiliency in standing up to the military. The reporters asked her very tough questions that were in some ways prescient of an inherent contradiction in her eloquent speeches about the need for democracy and the way she and her party were complicit in the persecution of Muslim Rohingya population and other ethnic minorities.
For a while, the free press in Myanmar had momentum and seemed to be establishing itself. Until March 17 2021, the day widely considered as the day independent media died in Myanmar. That day, roughly a month after the military coup, the last independent newspaper in the country ceased publication under the onerous and Orwellian demands of the junta, paving the way for the military to solidify their power and end the country’s democratic experiment, as we wrote back then.
During my reporting trips to Myanmar, before the collapse of a free press, I had the extraordinary opportunity to meet many of the press freedom heroes of the country, including Ko Swe Win, editor in chief of Myanmar Now. I reconnected with Swe, who is living in exile, two years ago in Vienna where the IPI World Congress awarded him a Press Freedom Award.
In his acceptance speech at IPI, he delivered a deceptively simple but profound message about the role of a free press in the face of tyranny:
“I accept and share this award on behalf of all those who risk everything to share the stories of our country,” Swe said standing at the podium in Vienna.
“No matter how dire the situation in Ukraine or any part of the world, we have to be steadfast to the truthfulness that is the integral part of our profession.”
Swe’s message resonates deeply in these times of natural and political disasters. If there is hope to rebuild a free press in Myanmar one day, it will have to be upon the foundation of truth, and we can only hope that by then, the U.S. government would have remembered the value of defending that ideal.
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In my 2004 North Korea history, Under thw Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, I wrote at length about the need for radio broadcasts from outside. RFA has played an important role in the lives of many North Koreans, who had to listen secretly, – maybe rolled up in blankets so the neighborhood snoop wouldn't hear. It is a terrible shame that Tunneled Dump has dumped it.