26 Aug 2025 | Africa, News and features, Somalia, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
Speaking out about societal issues such as poverty, hunger and police abuse in Somalia is perilous. Both journalists and ordinary citizens practise self-censorship to avoid trouble. The country remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. More than 80 media workers have been killed since 1992, and dozens have been forced to leave the country due to threats on their lives.
A new directive issued by the government has worsened the situation by further restricting the media and the public from posting or broadcasting any information related to “insecurity” in the capital, Mogadishu. According to the minister of information, culture and tourism, Daud Aweis, those who violate this directive could face “legal consequences, including prosecution in court and severe punishment”.
Questioning government officials about security failures or attacks by the al-Shabaab militant group can land journalists or citizens in jail – as can highlighting issues such as poverty.
On Thursday 20 February at midday, Sayid Ali, a tuk-tuk driver, was waiting to pick up a client for a short ride into Mogadishu city centre when a group of armed police officers confronted him. They had his photo on their phones. Days earlier, Ali had spoken to local journalists about the corruption that has left many Mogadishu residents, including tuk-tuk drivers, struggling with hunger.
Ali, who is 46 years old and a father of five, had gained media attention under the nickname “Saan Miyaa”, which literally means “Is this how it is?” – a phrase expressing frustration over the widespread corruption that seems endless.
In an interview earlier that week with Shabelle TV, he had said: “People in Mogadishu are surviving on only a cup of tea every 24 hours because they have nothing to eat.” He blamed widespread corruption among government officials for driving up inflation, making it nearly impossible for ordinary citizens to afford even a single meal each day. He also complained about police extortion and the bribes they demanded from the city’s struggling tuk-tuk drivers.
External factors have made the problem worse. Somalia is one of the countries hardest hit by US president Donald Trump’s foreign aid freeze, with the termination of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) programme. The aid cuts have worsened food insecurity, reducing critical relief efforts at a time when drought, conflict and displacement were already pushing millions towards famine.
Following his arrest, Ali was taken to a police station and locked in a cell.
“They asked me why I was criticising the government. I said I was only describing the reality of our situation,” he told Index.
One officer allegedly turned the interrogation into a warning, telling Ali that he could be charged with “insulting the president” because his remarks directly implicated Somalia’s leadership. If found guilty of that, he could be imprisoned for between six months and three years.
“I was scared and did not know what to do,” he said. He was released after a day in detention but was given a final warning.
“We know you talk too much,” an officer allegedly told him. “But we warn you, stop talking about the president, or you will rot in jail.”
A police spokesperson, Abdifatah Adan Hassan, did not comment on Ali’s arrest. Ali was re-arrested and re-released in May, after speaking out publicly again.
Police brutality
This case is just one among dozens of arrests, harassment incidents and even killings targeting those who publicly criticise the government or the armed groups responsible for plunging Somalia into turmoil.
A few days before Ali’s arrest, a young man was reportedly killed in Afgooye, about 30km from Mogadishu, simply for sharing a Facebook post about police brutality. According to a family member who requested anonymity, Ismail Moalim, who was 27, was active on Facebook and had previously worked with the police.
“The police demand bribes from the families of detainees, and when they receive nothing, they beat them mercilessly,” the family member told Index.
The specific video that led to Moalim’s death, which has since been deleted, showed a police officer in Afgooye beating a young detainee. The footage was allegedly leaked online by a whistleblower, then shared more widely on Facebook.
“Ismail had only shared the video because he had many followers. Unfortunately, the officer involved in the beating knew him personally and came to our house. He shot Ismail twice in the head. Ismail died on the spot,” the family member said.
Impunity is high in Somalia – cases of murder are rarely investigated and perpetrators rarely arrested, especially when victims belong to a less influential group. Ismail’s case is a clear example of this, as he belonged to the Bagadi minority group, which has little influence among authorities or politicians.
The plight of female journalists
Women journalists are at particular risk. On the morning of Saturday 15 March, the National Intelligence and Security Agency (Nisa) raided the home of journalist Bahjo Abdullahi Salad in Mogadishu. Salad, who works for local news station RTN TV, had posted a video clip on her TikTok account showing rubbish left in a residential area after a Ramadan iftar feast attended by prime minister Hamza Abdi Barre and his entourage.
“Cleanliness is half of faith. The rubbish left here could pose a health risk to the general public, particularly young children who play in the area. I ask government officials to please clean up your waste,” Salad said in her viral video.
Soon after the video was published, armed Nisa officers entered Salad’s family home and took her away. Her frightened relatives raised the alarm, and fellow journalists quickly reported the incident online.
Nisa has a notorious reputation, with many of its officers being former militants. Three months earlier, another female journalist, Shukri Aabi Abdi, was dragged and beaten in Mogadishu by Nisa officers while covering protests against forced evictions. Her camera operator, Ali Hassan Guure of Risaala Media Corporation, was arrested, and their footage was deleted.
Unlike Abdi, Salad was not physically harmed. Later that day, her sister found her in a police station cell in the Wardhiigley district. She was released without charge but was forced to delete the video of the rubbish as a condition of her freedom.
“My family told me to accept their demands because they would not release me otherwise,” Salad told Index.
Freedom of expression at risk
At the Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS), we track deleted content from journalists and, when possible, republish it as evidence in our ongoing documentation of media freedom violations in the country, so we have now reposted Salad’s clip.
These incidents highlight the deteriorating state of freedom of expression in the country. In Somaliland, a northern Somali region that declared independence in 1991, authorities shut down the privately-owned Universal TV on 12 February, accusing the station of “violating an agreement” with the government and breaching “Somaliland’s nationhood”. The Ministry of Information, Culture and National Guidance ordered all cable networks to remove Universal TV, banned the use of its logo, and instructed local advertisers to cancel their contracts with the station. Universal TV remains closed.
Later in February, the governor of Somaliland’s Togdheer region ordered the arrest of three journalists in Burao – Said Ali Osman of Sky Cable TV, Ayanle Ige Duale of Sahan TV and Abdiasis Saleban Sulub of KF Media – after they reported on his ties to local clan militias and the destruction of a water reservoir belonging to herders near Burao.
Freedom of expression in Somalia remains highly restricted and dangerous to navigate due to government repression, threats from armed groups and impunity for crimes against journalists. Killings and attacks on journalists rarely lead to justice, as perpetrators – whether government officials, security forces or militants – are almost never held to account.
The situation for journalists is getting worse. In March, police in Mogadishu arrested 19 journalists from both local and international media – the largest number yet in a single day in Somalia. They were rounded up onto a truck and taken to a police station, where their camera equipment was confiscated and their footage was deleted before they were released.
They had been covering the aftermath of an al-Shabaab bomb attack on President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s convoy just outside the presidential palace on 18 March. Following the arrests, police also raided the local radio station, Risaala, due to its coverage of the bomb attack. Armed officers stormed in and shut down the radio transmitters, arresting five journalists.
CCTV footage from the radio station’s offices showed the police forcing their way into the building before taking the journalists into custody. They were released the same day after being warned that they “should not say anything about insecurity”.
What is even more troubling than the raid itself is that the police commander who led it is a former al-Shabaab terrorist commander who defected to the government and was later promoted to a position of authority in Mogadishu.
While the president survived the al-Shabaab bomb attack, several civilians were killed, including journalist Mohamed Abukar Dabaashe, whom I mentored when he was a trainee at Radio Risaala, where I was chief editor in 2011.
Aged only 31, Dabaashe was in his home when the massive bomb exploded, causing the entire building to collapse. His body was found hours later. He was laid to rest the following day, as family and colleagues, overcome with grief, gathered at Madina Hospital.
Threats growing
As always, hope for accountability for the young journalist’s murder has faded away. When al-Shabaab bombs kill civilians, including journalists, and the government also targets them, accountability becomes impossible. Those brave enough to continue reporting face threats from all sides.
These threats are only intensifying. Between 22 and 24 May, 15 journalists were arrested in 48 hours, with the SJS recording a disturbing spike in arbitrary detentions, equipment confiscation and the obstruction of media workers by security forces. On 25 May, a media worker for the privately-owned Mogadishu television network Astaan TV was also killed – Abdifatah Abdi Osman was riding his motorbike on his way to work when he was shot by a hotel security guard.
When physical violence or criminal prosecutions are not used, legal and financial threats can be. I have faced legal threats for writing critically about a Somalia-based bank linked to the president.
The threats against me, which began in January, are part of the long-term persecution I have endured as a journalist and secretary-general of the SJS. A London-based law firm working on behalf of the bank threatened to sue me if I did not delete my social media posts and issue the bank an apology. The same bank, which has ties to the Somali government, has previously targeted both me and SJS, at one point freezing the SJS’s bank accounts and blocking its funding.
Somalian journalists face assaults from the authorities, opposition and militant groups, and big businesses. Under this constant attack, it increasingly feels that we have little recourse.
23 Jul 2025 | Asia and Pacific, India, News and features
When journalist Afraaz Hussain (not his real name) tried to revisit a series of investigative reports he had filed on human rights abuses in Indian-administered Kashmir, he was stunned to find the links broken and the pages wiped clean. Some of his most critical stories – on government surveillance, military misconduct and civil unrest – had vanished without explanation.
“A lot of my work from the region is totally missing,” said Hussain, who asked that his name be changed to protect his identity. “Entire archives of newspapers before 2019 are missing. Stories critical of the government have disappeared.”
Apart from losing most of his investigative work, which he first noticed had vanished around two years ago, Hussain says he is facing police intimidation and a ban on his travel outside the country.
Many reporters and editors based in India say media outlets are deliberately erasing or hiding their work amid what they describe as growing pressure from the Indian government to limit reporting critical of its policies. Stories that once documented surveillance, hate crimes and rights abuses are now vanishing from digital archives without explanation.
The government has also, in many cases, explicitly ordered the takedown of journalistic pieces that highlight alleged human rights abuses. For instance, last year, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting directed a magazine to remove an article detailing accusations of torture and extrajudicial killing by the Indian Army in the Jammu region.
This is true not only for the conflict-torn Indian-administered Kashmir and Jammu regions, even if it may have started there. Across India, a quiet purge of digital content is underway. News stories critical of the government are being erased – scrubbed from websites, replaced with 404 errors or removed after veiled legal threats. Journalists and activists call it a “digital vanishing act” that’s increasingly common in the country’s shrinking press freedom landscape.
“404 journalism” is becoming the norm
Veteran journalist and author Ruben Banerjee calls it “404 journalism”.
“You click on a link and the story’s just not there anymore,” Banerjee told Index. “It’s becoming a new genre of journalism in India – stories that once were, but are now memory.”
Banerjee was ousted from Outlook Magazine in 2021, a move he believes is in part linked to the magazine publishing a series of stories critical of the Modi government which allegedly invited political pressure on the publication.
Banerjee cited daily Hindustan Times’ now-defunct Hate Tracker as one of many casualties of “404 journalism”. The tracker, which meticulously documented hate crimes across India, disappeared from the outlet’s website with no public notice or editorial clarification.
“Nobody disputed its facts,” he said. “But the political sensitivity was enough to have it pulled.”
The takedown coincided with the exit of editor Bobby Ghosh. The Wire reported that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a personal meeting with the publication’s proprietor, Shobhana Bhartia, in the months before Ghosh’s departure, and government officials raised objections about Ghosh’s editorial decisions.
In some cases, journalists themselves are requesting takedowns, driven by fear rather than falsehoods.
“Some are scared because their old work is now being used against them,” Banerjee said. “But that is not journalism. That is capitulation.”
The erasure of digital archives is not new, but its scale and coordination appear unprecedented. In Kashmir, where Hussain worked as a correspondent for multiple outlets, entire archives were purged following the Indian government’s 2019 abrogation of Article 370, which revoked the region’s special status.
“Most English, Urdu and vernacular newspapers had their archives wiped clean,” Hussain said. “It is not like a few pieces were removed, it is an institutional erasure.”
These deletions, he said, targeted some of the most impactful journalism on record. “We spent weeks on those investigations. These were exclusive stories on grave issues. When that disappears, you are erasing the rough draft of history.”
The implications are serious.
“For students, researchers, even citizens trying to trace how events unfolded, that material is gone,” said Maariyah Siddique, a research scholar at Aliah University, in the state of West Bengal. “The government’s intention is clear: to intimidate journalists, activists and whistleblowers, reminding them of the government’s omnipresence.”
She added: “Even the government knows that in the digital age, information once posted online cannot really disappear, but such tactics are directed at creating long-term impacts [rather] than short term. It is more mental and psychological than physical intimidation of journalists.”
This subtle form of pressure, explained Siddique, is not only about erasing content but also about instilling a sense of vulnerability among journalists.
“Sometimes government action is simply meant to warn the concerned that their work is being heard and they will be chased next,” she said.
The chilling effect
The government’s legal toolkit also plays a role. A notable example is the 2022 arrest of Kashmiri PhD scholar Abdul Aala Fazili for an article he wrote in 2011. Since then, media houses and their contributors have grown more wary. Several editors told Index that authors and scholars now request takedowns of old pieces, fearing their writing could be used against them.
“What’s worrying,” said Banerjee, “is that many media organisations don’t wait for official orders. They self-censor, just to avoid displeasing the powers that be.”
The consequences go beyond deletion. The constant fear of retaliation has created a culture of self-censorship and editorial paranoia.
“No one even pitches stories critical of the government anymore,” said Qazi Zaid, an editor with Free Press Kashmir, one of the few independent media houses in the region. “We are walking on eggshells with every story. Many authors and journalists ask us to take their articles down because they think it is affecting their passport applications or fellowships.”
Experts say erasure of archives is not just about control but “erasing the past” to influence the future.
“When journalism disappears, so does accountability,” said Siddique. “Every post, every report, every fact contributes to an informed electorate. Erasing it is an act of political manipulation.”
Journalistic freedom in India has steadily declined in recent years, slipping to 151 out of 180 countries in the latest Reporters Without Borders (RSF) press freedom index. Journalists say the vanishing archives are just one more indicator of this decline.
“Press freedom is being eroded like never before,” said Hussain. “And now, it is not just what you can’t say, it is also what you did say, that gets you in trouble.”
For journalists and media experts, it is a moment of reckoning.
“You start reporting, knowing the risks,” said Siddique. “But this erasure… it is the last blow. If your work isn’t going to survive, what’s the point of doing it at all?”
16 Jul 2025 | News and features
For years, the United Kingdom has looked to the United States for moral clarity and strategic leadership in confronting the challenge posed by China’s authoritarian state. Whether it was the decision to ban Huawei from Britain’s 5G networks or to speak out against abuses in Xinjiang and the erosion of freedoms in Hong Kong, British policymakers often found strength in US resolve. Washington’s warnings were heeded, and alignment on values was assumed. That is why it is all the more jarring that a possible threat to Britain’s free press is now emerging, not from Beijing, but from a private equity office in New York.
The deal in question is RedBird Capital Partners’ proposed acquisition of The Daily Telegraph, one of the UK’s oldest, most important and influential newspapers. At face value, this might seem like a typical media buyout. But behind the gloss lies something more serious: a growing fear that this deal could open the door to Chinese influence in Britain’s media ecosystem.
At the heart of these concerns is John Thornton, RedBird’s chairman. Thornton’s connections to the Chinese state are not historical or incidental, but ongoing. He sits on the International Advisory Council of the China Investment Corporation (CIC), the country’s sovereign wealth fund. He has held senior roles at Chinese state-linked institutions. He has chaired the Silk Road Finance Corporation, a Belt and Road Initiative vehicle backed by state-aligned Chinese entities. Most tellingly, he has consistently echoed CCP narratives in public, once praising Xi Jinping as “the right man, at the right place, at the right time,” according to the Wire.
In 2023, Thornton himself related that he had told senior Chinese officials that they were losing the global narrative war because their story was being told by Westerners. He advised them to “get into” English-language media channels to shape international perceptions. He said: “The Chinese story is told by people who are not Chinese… until you start to get into those channels, you’re going to be at a big, big disadvantage.”
Now, under his chairmanship, RedBird is attempting to purchase The Telegraph.
This is where the line between ownership and influence becomes critical. The UK government is proposing to change the law to facilitate the RedBird deal, lifting the ban on foreign government ownership of UK media, and allowing up to 15% instead (coincidentally precisely the percentage needed to facilitate the Telegraph deal). This, argues the UK, will be sufficient to prevent foreign influence. But ownership, especially in an era of sophisticated financial engineering and opaque sovereign investment, tells only part of the story.
Thornton leads a firm with documented co-investments alongside Tencent, a Chinese tech giant designated by the US Department of Defense as a Chinese military company. RedBird has established a regional headquarters in Hong Kong, now subject to China’s national security laws. And Thornton himself maintains overlapping personal, commercial and political links to the CCP ecosystem that make it more than valid to question whether genuine independence would be possible. It’s not for nothing that Thornton received the CCP’s highest honour for foreigners in 2008, or was invited to tour Xinjiang when even the United Nations wasn’t allowed in to investigate atrocity crimes against Uyghurs and other minorities.
Influence can be subtle: a boardroom conversation, a commercial pressure, a well-timed phone call. But in the case of a national newspaper like The Telegraph, even subtle influence can be profoundly distorting. It sets the editorial tone, shapes hiring decisions, filters coverage, inculcates self-censorship and ultimately shifts public debate. The risk is not just theoretical, it is structural.
And yet, instead of confronting the risk, the UK government is falling over itself to facilitate the acquisition. Happily, not everyone is fooled. A major rebellion is brewing in the House of Lords, where, on 22 July, lawmakers in the UK’s appointed House will vote on a fatal motion to block these changes, in what could be one of the most consequential media votes in a generation. I hope they succeed.
Curiously, meanwhile, the British press has largely remained silent. A kind of omertá seems to be prevailing, perhaps for fear of offending potential future owners, or attracted by the possibility of selling 15% of their own business to foreign governments. But silence only compounds the danger. If influence is allowed to masquerade as passive ownership, the integrity of democratic debate really is at risk. Nobody in their right mind believes that news proprietors have no influence over editorial direction.
This isn’t just a British problem. It’s a case study in how soft power and sovereign wealth are used to circumvent democratic safeguards. RedBird has also been at the heart of the effort to acquire Paramount, drawing criticism from the House Committee on the CCP over the involvement of Chinese company TenCent. The fact that these media deals are occurring under the umbrella of a US firm – one led by a man who has publicly supported a more assertive Chinese media presence in the West – should raise serious questions.
Democracies must learn to distinguish ownership from influence, and legislation from reality. The Telegraph may soon become a test of whether we still can.
RedBird and Thornton were approached for comment
Luke de Pulford is creator and executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China
26 Jun 2025 | Americas, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Czech Republic, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia, Ukraine, United States
A version of this article was originally published in the British Journalism Review.
Let me tell you about four brave journalists. One morning last May, Farid Mehralizada was arrested by masked police. The Azerbaijani financial reporter later described how the officers put a bag over his head, handcuffed him and forced him into a police car. They accompanied him home, where they searched for incriminating evidence as his pregnant wife watched. He was charged with smuggling and money laundering. Mehralizada has been in prison ever since and missed the birth of the child his wife was carrying. His only crime was exposing Azerbaijan’s overreliance on its reserves of oil and gas. “90% of Azerbaijan’s exports and 50% of its budget revenues depend on the oil and gas sector, which poses significant risks for the country,” he told a Baku court in April. Earlier this month, Mehralizada was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison following a trial his employer called a “sham”.
Belarusian journalist Ihar Losik was detained in June 2020 in advance of the rigged elections in his country and accused of “organising mass riots” and “incitement to hatred”. In December 2021, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Losik was transferred to a labour camp in June 2022 and added to a terrorist watch list. He has since used hunger strikes to protest against his detention but is currently incommunicado.
Ukrainian Vladyslav Yesypenko left Crimea after the Russian annexation of the peninsula in 2014, but he kept returning to his homeland to report on Vladimir Putin’s illegal occupation. He was arrested in March 2021 on suspicion of collecting information for Ukrainian intelligence and later charged with the “possession and transport of explosives”. In February 2022, he was sentenced to six years in prison. He was finally released on 22 June 2025, after more than four years of detention and separation from his family.
In November 2024, Russian freelancer Nika Novak was sentenced to four years in prison on charges of “confidential collaboration” with a foreign organisation. Earlier this year, she was placed in a detention centre usually reserved for prisoners at risk of escape, violent inmates or members of extremist organisations. At the end of March, the court of appeal in Novosibirsk in the far east of Russia upheld her sentence, fined her 500,000 roubles ($6,380) and made her pay prosecution witnesses’ expenses.
What these journalists have in common – apart from their courage and determination to report on authoritarian abuses – is that they all worked for the US Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) before their detention.
In February, Richard Grenell, presidential envoy for special missions, posted on X [now deleted] that “state-owned” broadcasters such as RFE/RL were “a relic of the past”. Elon Musk, the billionaire former head of Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) responded: “Yes, shut them down. Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Nobody listens to them anymore. It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”
It’s hard to imagine a more ill-informed statement about the state of liberty in eastern Europe. It would be laughable to describe Mehralizada, Losik, Yesypenko and Novak as “radical left crazy people”, if the consequences of Musk’s words weren’t so catastrophic.
On 15 March, barely a month after Grenell and Musk’s statements, RFE/RL was informed by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) that its grant from Congress had been terminated. Lawyers acting for the broadcaster immediately challenged the decision to terminate the funding and Judge Royce Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted the application. He concluded that closure would cause “irreparable harm” and added “in keeping with Congress’s longstanding determination… the continued operation of RFE/RL is in the public interest”.
Despite the ruling, USAGM at first refused to release funds for April, forcing RFE/RL to furlough staff to keep the organisation afloat. Then, on 29 April, Judge Lamberth concluded that USAGM’s refusal to pay the grant on the same terms as the previous month was “arbitrary and capricious”. He rejected USAGM’s argument that it could withhold the funds until a new grant agreement had been signed with amended working conditions. The judge concluded that the actions of the agency could “threaten the very existence” of RFE/RL.
RFE/RL president and CEO Stephen Capus said the ruling meant his journalists could “continue doing their jobs holding dictators and despots accountable”. The organisation will continue to fight for funding to be restored in full.
Meanwhile, at the time of going to press, the future of its 1,300 journalists and support staff hangs in the balance. The fate of its imprisoned staff is even more precarious.
One peculiar and surreal aspect to the Trump administration’s attacks on RFE/RL is that the organisation was traditionally seen by the “radical left” as a propaganda arm of the US government, along with its sister broadcaster Voice of America (VOA), which also faces closure. The soft-power value of these institutions seems lost on those surrounding the US president.
It was not lost on Ronald Reagan. As a young actor in the 1950s, the future Cold War warrior recorded an advert for RFE that recognised its ideological worth in the battle against communism. “This station daily pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth, answering the lies of the Kremlin and bringing a message of hope to millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain,” he said.
It is perhaps not surprising that Musk has conflated the various Congress-funded broadcasters as they are often mixed up in the public imagination. But they have very specific origins and functions. VOA was founded during the Second World War to counter the fascist ideology of Nazi Germany, while RFE was a post-war response to communist propaganda in Soviet-occupied countries. RL had the specific task of broadcasting inside Russia. VOA was designed, as its name suggests, to speak for the US government and the American people, whereas RFE/RL began by representing dissident views from within Soviet-occupied countries. As a mark of its significant role during the Cold War, the Czech president Vaclav Havel, himself a former dissident, invited RFE/RL to move its headquarters from Munich to Prague in 1995.
RFE/RL now operates in 27 languages across 23 countries, with specialist services in Iran and Afghanistan. In recent years, it has made the case for independent journalism in the countries where it operates, part of the reason it is so despised by Putin and other authoritarian leaders across Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. In February 2024, it was designated an “undesirable organisation” in Russia, forcing many of its journalists to move into exile and operate remotely from Lithuania and Latvia. In April this year, the US government shut off a satellite that transmitted its Russian-language service into Russia.
The move against RFE/RL came as a surprise to the organisation’s management, who had no inkling that it was a potential target. No one within the organisation was consulted and no warning given.
Nicola Careem, vice president and editor in chief of RFE/RL, said: “In some of the places we work, we’re not just one voice among many – we are the media. When every other outlet has been silenced, taken over or driven out, our journalists stay. They keep reporting, often at great personal risk, just to make sure the truth still gets through. I’ve seen what that means on the ground. For millions of people, we’re their only source of trusted news. If RFE/RL disappears, so does independent journalism in those countries. That’s the reality. There’s no safety net – except us.”
One tragedy among many in this miserable saga is that RFE/RL had begun to find a new role for itself in the Putin era. This was especially true after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its Russian-language channels reached a peak of 400 million views on YouTube in February 2022 as the invasion began. This is why the recent blocking of the Russian-language satellite takes on such a sinister edge.
When I spoke to Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy for RFE/RL, in the summer of 2022 for Index on Censorship, he was full of optimism: “We have fantastic teams serving Russia. And I think it’s really one of those moments where you see our journalists living up to the task and the challenge that they face. And it’s really inspiring.” That optimism has been torpedoed by the news from Washington.
The reality is that in parts of Central Asia, where independent journalists find it difficult to operate, RFE/RL is there to provide an important check on Russian and Chinese misinformation. As a result, its affiliates have been periodically blocked across the region.
Careem said: “Make no mistake – we’re in the middle of an information war. Authoritarian regimes in Russia, China and Iran are standing by, ready to take over any space RFE/RL is forced to leave behind. They will spend billions to capture our audiences, flood the region with propaganda, and fuel instability. This is not the moment for the free world to look away, or to leave the field open. If we step back, they step in. It’s that simple.”
But the picture is complicated. The organisation has not been without its critics, even before the arrival of Trump in the White House. Journalists in the region already expressed their concern in 2023 when the broadcaster announced its Kazakh service (Radio Azattyk) would move away from broadcasting in Russian. The US organisation argued that a combined service operating across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan would pool resources and produce better journalism. Local journalists, some of whom had been critics of REF/RL for years, were not convinced.
Asem Tokayeva, who worked at Azattyk for 14 years, has been calling for reform of the organisation since she left in 2017. Speaking to The Times of Central Asia in April in response to the grant cut, she said: “The organisation has long had an opaque management system and a culture of mutual protection. Real control over the content and personnel decisions rests with mid-level managers, vice presidents, and regional directors, who actively resist reforms. The leadership shields its own from accountability, allowing the system to remain unchanged.”
RFE/RL’s critics in Washington are not motivated by these criticisms and are unlikely even to be aware of them. The drama playing itself out in the US District Court for the District of Columbia is existential. On 22 April, Judge Lamberth ruled that the decision to require VOA to stop broadcasting was illegal. He ordered the administration to restore VOA and two other independent networks operated by the USAGM – Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. He did not make the same order for RFE/RL.
The uncertain situation at RFE/RL raises unsettling questions for the future of independent journalism across Central and Eastern Europe, not least for the exiled journalists who could find themselves stranded and jobless in Prague or the Baltic countries.
As the future of the broadcaster hangs in the balance, the Czech government has led the way by pledging to support RFE/RL’s continued presence in Prague. Prime minister Petr Fiala told the Financial Times in March: “We will do everything that we can to give them the chance to continue in this very important role.” He also emphasised the historical significance of the organisation. ‘‘I know what it meant for me in communist times,” he said. At the same time, Czech foreign minister Jan Lipavský celebrated its relevance to the present global situation on X: “Radio Free Europe is one of the few credible sources in dictatorships like Iran, Belarus, and Afghanistan”.
The Czech government has led calls for the European Union to step in to fill the hole left by USAGM. That is likely to face resistance from the so-called “hybrid democracies” of Hungary and Slovakia, where the leaderships are sympathetic to Russia and independent media are under attack. The UK government has so far not commented on developments, but Index on Censorship has called on the Foreign Office to make representations on behalf of the stranded journalists.
Could there also be a role for the BBC World Service, a historical competitor? There are certainly parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia where the BBC’s coverage could benefit from the expertise of RFE/RL journalists. Careem is exploring all possibilities: “We’re facing real financial and political uncertainty, but one thing is clear: anyone who values democracy, press freedom, and truthful information has a stake in ensuring RFE/RL survives. We’ve been deeply gratified by the support from our European partners as we work through a range of solutions that would allow us to continue this critical work.”
Meanwhile, the exiled journalists at RFE find themselves in the bizarre position of being double dissidents: in their home countries and now, effectively, in the USA too.
To see Index’s coverage of these broadcasting institutions, click here.
