Our Contribution To Glasnost

MODERN COMMUNICATIONS technology is perhaps the single most important factor contributing to the worldwide demand for liberty and the decline of oppressive regimes from Berlin to Beijing.

Telephones, facsimile and copying machines and personal computer modems proved indispensable in the revolutions of 1989. Even where the historic tide of freedom has been temporarily slowed, as in China, these devices are being used clandestinely to share information and keep the faith.

Of even greater importance have been Western radio broadcasts, particularly those beamed to the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China.

The opportunity to hear firsthand and in one’s own language accurate reports of the courage and temerity of students in Tiananmen Square, demonstrators in Leipzig and strikers in Siberia inspired and emboldened millions of others to join in the demand to end oppression. Where they can be received, the signals of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and the Voice of America (VOA) have become particularly powerful catalysts for democratic reform.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost has had two salutary effects in this area: abandonment of the practice of jamming RFE/RL and VOA broadcasts; and an end to the harassment of those who faithfully listened to these radio services, despite the jamming. But there are large sections of the Soviet Union – arguably among its most important at the moment, including Soviet Central Asia -where this benefit of glasnost has not yet been fully realized.

In such regions, the RFE/RL or VOA transmissions can only be received faintly (if at all), with or without Soviet jamming. Similarly, significant parts of Eastern Europe, East Africa, Southwest Asia, India and Pakistan are unable to receive proper coverage. As a result, people in the affected areas are being denied reliable, regular access to the informative programming of these services in their native tongues and in English.

TO ITS lasting credit, Israel has agreed to help remedy this situation. In the spring of 1987, it entered into a formal agreement with the United States to construct a facility near Hazeva that would permit Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America to relay shortwave radio signals to those too far removed from existing antennas to receive RFE/RL or VOA broadcasts.

Preparations for this facility are underway, with an expected completion date of 1993.

Given the palpable contribution being made by RFE/RL and VOA to myriad ongoing struggles for the very liberties held dear by Israelis and Americans – to say nothing of the fact that, in the absence of the relay station in the Negev, many who wish to be part of such struggles will be denied information vital to their participation – it is astonishing that some people are questioning the need to proceed with this joint project.

Far from being an anachronistic irrelevancy in the so-called post-Cold War world, the Israel relay station has an important role to play in the further evolution of that world. By extending the reach of objective reporting, the RFE/RL and VOA operation will help to enfranchise millions who have yet to benefit from this promising new era. Moreover, this facility will constitute a significant hedge against the possibility that a future Soviet government may seek to curb its citizens’ access to Western information.

Other arguments for forgoing the RFE/RL and VOA project in Israel are similarly without merit.

Those who maintain that the facility will represent a health hazard to its employees and individuals in the adjacent community have no supportable evidence of any detrimental effects on humans, plants or animals.

Those who contend that the station’s antennas or signals will interfere with bird migration ignore evidence to the contrary arising from years of experience with migratory flocks overflying the electromagnetically saturated air space along the U.S. East Coast.

Israeli government and military officials, as well as environmentalists, have visited several VOA and RFE/RL stations without deriving supportable evidence of any detrimental effects.

As a strong American supporter of Israel, I believe it is of great importance to the emerging strategic relationship between our two countries that the 1987 agreement be honoured, and that Israel in this way add to the other important contributions it is making to the preservation and expansion of freedom.