Lawmaker Urges U.S. to Drop Plans to Build Voa Transmitter in Negev

Citing environmental concerns and the diminishing military threat from the Soviet Union, a congressman this week called on the U.S. government to drop plans to build a Voice of America transmitter in Israel’s Negev desert.

Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.), who spoke to reporters in his Capitol Hill office Tuesday, on his 70th birthday, has no clear plan for redistributing the money, which he said could go to deficit reduction, to domestic programs or to Israeli cooperative projects with other countries.

Construction has not yet begun on the transmitter, and Israel has spent only about $64 million of the $247 million that Congress earmarked for the project after the United States and Israel signed an agreement to build the transmitter in 1987.

The VOA has long been one of the U.S. government’s chief instruments in the propaganda war against communism. Erecting a transmitter in Israel would bolster the strength and range of the station’s broadcast signal in Eastern Europe, which until recently was regularly jammed by Soviet authorities.

But in the wake of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or greater openness, political support for the VOA and other anti-communist informational projects appears to be waning.

In a letter this week to key congressional colleagues, Scheuer wrote, “The final death knell for this project should be the recent dramatic changes that have taken place in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.”

ISRAEL SAID TO HAVE CONCERNS

But there are other issues at stake, as well. Four environmental groups joined Scheuer in expressing concerns about how the transmitter would upset bird migration patterns and require the Israel Defense Force to relocate a base, thereby closing off a large portion of the remaining open desert landscape of the Negev.

The groups are the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, Friends of the Earth, National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club.

The State Department issued a statement Wednesday saying that the Israeli government is “studying a number of issues related to the project, including an environmental-impact study submitted by the Board of International Broadcasting. We are awaiting the Israeli government’s decision.”

A State Department official said Israel, too, has serious concerns about the project.

But Ruth Yaron, spokeswoman at the Israeli Embassy here, had no comment on the project’s merit.

According to Scheuer, the Israelis feel “that there was a great deal of pressure on them in 1987 to cooperate with the United States” to overcome Soviet jamming of VOA broadcasts in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

“The Israeli Defense Force had real reservations” about the project, because “they had to move at least one enormous military air base.

“But they did it to accommodate events,” said Scheuer. “They won’t say that publicly, but there is no zeal whatsoever that I could detect speaking to Israeli officials for this project.”