91Èȱ¬

I'll start with an anecdote from my youth. I was in the Soviet Army. We had got back to our barracks after the summer holidays, and the osobist (the KGB officer looking after us) secretly searched all of our luggage that had been left in the storage room. He found a radio set, belonging to a private Burkov was tuned to the 91Èȱ¬. Next day Burkov was punished with three days' of chores in the kitchen which catered for 1000 people.

It was a petty punishment. Especially in the context of more serious freedom of speech stories such as the missing China lawyer Gao Zhisheng or Arundhati Roy being threatened for arrest for sedition, but it shows the depth that institutions and governments have taken to prevent access to an impartial media.

I have a book in front of me, which we have published for the 10th anniversary of 91Èȱ¬ Uzbek

The volumne is full of the listeners' stories about what the 91Èȱ¬ World Service means for them. Uzbek poet Yusuf Juma, wrote the following light-hearted poem:

Every evening it shows where
What's what to dictators.
My dark people,
Listen to 91Èȱ¬!

It removes rust of
Lies and gossips.
It opens your blind eyes,
Listen to 91Èȱ¬!

It aspires to educate
Uneducated mobs.
Those who are shown where what's what,
Listen to 91Èȱ¬!

Yusuf Juma is now in prison in Uzbekistan for expressing his opinion about a further term of rule for President Karimov, who has been ruling Uzbekistan for the last 21 years.

Another Uzbek listener famously said: "The 91Èȱ¬ broadcasts are the one hour of Truth in the 24x7 sea of propaganda of lies". This access to truth in the media is not just about the Uzbek listeners.

In Azerbaijan the oppositional figure known as S.J-o told us in an interview after his release from prison that inmates used to listen to the 91Èȱ¬ on a smuggled small radio, which they hid during the day in a piece of soap.

Truth is addictive, especially in closed societies and people will go the extra mile to get a gulp of the fresh air it provides. I've seen printouts on scraps of paper in Uzbekistan of our 91Èȱ¬ blogs. They had been printed out and handed around on the streets.

A journalist from Turkmenistan Olgusapar Muradova died in custody in 2006. She had been imprisoned for working with Western media outlets, including the 91Èȱ¬. Thanks to her undercover work with the 91Èȱ¬, journalists have reported for example .

Other reporters have been killed for reporting for 91Èȱ¬ World Service: such as Afghan reporters Mirwais Jalil and were killed for their reporting to the World Service.

The examples above are from the region of concern to me in my day to day work, but I'm sure that any of my colleagues, be they Burmese or Chinese, Russian or Brazilian, Bengali or Sri Lankan could tell you how much the truth costs in their respective areas.

Now that every penny which is spent by 91Èȱ¬ World Service is counted and recounted, when the mission of the World Service is laid against scarce money available for it, when all the talk is about cost efficiency and value for money, the ancedotes above serve as a reminder that in many cases, what the World Service does has much higher price. Sometimes the cost is human life.

I would like to finish with another anecdote which shows the extent to which the 91Èȱ¬ permeates even the world's most remote regions.

A 91Èȱ¬ World Service Editor was in a distant mountainous area of Kyrgyzstan on a mission to find "an innocent person, who has no idea of the media".

In between of sky-scraping summits, she was brought to a jayloo - an alpine pasture, where a simple shepherd appeared in front of her.

The Editor explained her mission, but as soon as she introduced herself as a 91Èȱ¬ journalist, the shepherd clasped his hands and started to recite excitedly the names of the 91Èȱ¬ Kyrgyz presenters and reporters along with other correspondents, appearing in the programmes and added: "They are like my family in my solitude!"

With this in mind, the question I'd like to ask you is what is your most memorable encounter with the 91Èȱ¬ World Service?