When Kari Lake was nominated as a special advisor to the United States Agency for Global Media, some media outlets reported that Trump had asked Lake to gut the government agency that oversees Voice of America (VOA). Instead of gutting, Kari Lake dismantled the agency, which oversees six organizations, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America. I don’t know much about the other organizations that were closed, but I know a lot about Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Afghan Service, known as Radio Azadi. (to call it Azadi, which means freedom, is a misnomer; I will write on this more in an upcoming blog post). I worked in its Kabul bureau as a technical manager in 2003. I was responsible for all communication tools, technology, radio broadcasting, and relay systems. I know how corrupt this organization was. I mean corrupt in every sense, ethically and financially.
During the time I worked, male journalists would openly demand sex from their female colleagues in broad daylight, and sometimes in crude ways. They uploaded pornographic videos onto female journalists' computers. They set pornographic images as desktop wallpapers on women’s computers. The vile and crude sexual harassment men inflicted on women was widespread. Female journalists were intimated and coerced in a variety of ways. No one addressed the women’s complaints. If a complaint was made, the victim would be accused of misconduct and moral corruption and eventually fired. So, no one said anything and really had the courage to complain.
One day, I was in the administrative manager's office. "Look outside," he said, pointing to a young girl in black clothes standing on the fourth floor of the Mustafa Hotel, leaning against the fence while her hands clasping onto the handrail. “She wants a job. She’s from your ethnic group, Hazara,” he said, with a contemptuous smile that conveyed disdain, humiliation, and condescension. I turned around and looked outside; the young girl was standing at the office's front door, belonging to the radio director. I asked if she had brought her resume and if she had been shortlisted or called up for an interview. He hinted that she wanted to be hired through “another way.” He meant she had to bow to the director’s demands first, and we could do nothing. The manager told me the demands were sexual.
Some of the women who were sexually harassed now live in Europe and North America. I think if they have the courage, they should file complaints against those men. Some of those men now live in Europe and Australia.
In the year that I worked at Radio Azadi, the Afghanistan branch in Kabul, embezzlement and theft were practiced at maximum. The administrative manager handled all purchases himself, including buying groceries. The manager, whose primary responsibility was to ensure the smooth and efficient operation of the organization through daily management, staff supervision, record-keeping, facilitating communication, and ensuring compliance with policies, spent half his day driving his car to the market to buy food supplies. From potatoes and eggplants to oil and gas, transportation, travel costs, and technology purchases, all were doubly charged. His subordinates were his close relatives. The guards at the gate were his relatives. The rented cars belonged to senior managers of the radio, who had leased them to the radio at exorbitant rates. Some of them had bought two or three cars just to rent them to the radio at high costs. They were profiting from every angle—from the daily wages of laborers digging trenches for pipes and electricity to food supplies, transportation, and everything else.
At Radio Azadi, nepotism was of utmost importance. Hiring was based on favoritism, and preferential treatment was given to family members or close friends. The director of Radio Azadi in Afghanistan was a Pashtun from Wardak province. He had hired all his family members at the radio station—his brother, nephews, relatives, and even their young children as young as 10 for the children’s and youth programs. The only people he hadn’t brought in were their wives, sisters, and daughters, as this goes against the customs of some Pashtuns.
There was an unhealthy atmosphere filled with mistrust, hatred, rivalry, and hostility, especially between the administrative manager and the director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Kabul. These two men did not trust each other. Both men were vying over who should control the embezzlement and theft. They were contending over who should benefit from the money that was supposed to be spent on running a radio station that was supposed to do journalism. The director, a Pashtun from Wardak province, wanted to fire the administrative manager, a Turkmen retired general from the communist era, but he couldn’t because someone in the main office in Prague, Czech Republic, supported the manager.
To be continued...
A Farsi version of this blog post is published here