In a visit to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Prague headquarters yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the assembled journalists that their broadcasts into countries whose repressive regimes restrict free information puts them “on the front lines of freedom.”“As a specialist on the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I know that, for people behind the Iron Curtain, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were their virtual passports out of tyranny and into freedom,” said Secretary Rice. “RFE/RL’s present and future is to take those same basic ideas – that men, women and children can and must be free – and speak them loudly for people in Baghdad, Kabul, Tehran and all over the world.”
In addition to meeting with all RFE/RL staff, Secretary Rice met separately with Radio Free Afghanistan journalists and gave an interview to Radio Farda, RFE/RL’s Persian-language radio service that broadcasts into Iran.
Noting the historical irony of a US Secretary of State addressing the staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the same chamber that used to function as the Czechoslovak communist parliament, Secretary Rice said that “what seemed impossible in 1948 or 1949 seems, in retrospect, inevitable.”
While Rice argued that “liberty cannot be crushed because it exists in the hearts and minds of people,” she acknowledged that the struggle for freedom is often hard: “I know that many of you at RFE/RL have lost colleagues and friends,” she said. “They’ve been gunned down and they’ve been kidnapped because the price of freedom is often great. But the benefit of freedom is always worth it.”
(Source: RFE/RL)