LONDON, JAN 27 - The BBC World Service said Wednesday it would close five of its language services, shut down radio services for another seven languages and cut 650 jobs as it seeks to make drastic savings.
The Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa and Serbian language services as well as the English for the Caribbean regional service will all be shut down over the next three years.
The cuts will also spell the end of radio programmes in seven languages including Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese, although multimedia coverage in those languages will continue.
The head of Britain's National Union of Journalists, Jeremy Dear, claimed the measures were "an act of vandalism" which would do "irreparable damage".
"We are certainly surprised by the scale of it," he told BBC radio.
"For the very first time the BBC World Service will no longer be the leading international news provider by audience size. It will be overtaken by the Voice of America."
BBC Global News Director Peter Horrocks said: "This is a painful day for BBC World Service and the 180 million people around the world who rely on the BBC?s global news services every week.
"We are making cuts in services that we would rather not be making."
But Horrocks said the scale of the 16 percent savings target that the World Service must make as part of widespread government cuts "is such that we couldn't cope with this by efficiencies alone."
Amid a wave of government austerity measures, the BBC negotiated a new funding deal under which it will take over responsibility from the Foreign Office to fund the service.
The seven radio services to be cut are Russian -- apart from three programmes distributed solely online -- Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Turkish, Azeri and Spanish for Cuba.
The BBC said in these languages it would instead focus "as appropriate" on online, mobile and television content.
It will also cease all short wave radio services in Hindi, Indonesian, Kyrgyz, Nepali, Swahili as well as its Great Lakes service which takes in Rwanda and Burundi, although services will continue on FM radio and through the Internet and mobile phones.
The 650 jobs, a quarter of the World Service's total staff, will be phased out by 2014.
Horrocks said the BBC would help 20 "vulnerable" staff members, including Iranians, who would lose their visas as a result of the cuts and risked persecution if they returned to their home countries.
"It would not be right to send them back," he said.
BBC Director-General Mark Thompson insisted that despite the cuts, the World Service would remain "a source of truth and impartial analysis in a sea of propaganda and censorship" and a "beacon of light" in many countries.
"Supporters of the international role of the BBC should not despair," he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
"Our global TV and online presence is growing, and in many parts of the world, the BBC is a more influential and widely heard voice than at any point in our history."
@AFP
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