By NNN-Bernama,
Singapore : Singapore says the latest Wikileaks reports that implicates its leaders and officials for making disparaging remarks about friendly nations will not affect the republic’s ties with those countries.
“These relationships are built on a strong foundation of shared interests and mutually beneficial co-operation in many areas,” a spokesman from the Foreign Affairs Ministry said here Monday.
“Singapore has long-standing, robust and positive relationships with all countries in our region,” the spokesman said, adding that countries based relationships on their own interests and “not hearsay or gossip”.
The spokesman was responding to media queries on Australian press reports Sunday of United States Embassy cables leaked by WikiLeaks. The cables, recorded in 2008 and 2009, revealed damning statements made about Malaysia, Thailand, Japan and India, by senior Singapore officials in meetings with senior US officials.
“These press reports are based on American interpretations of confidential conversations that did not provide the full context, and in some cases, were from third party sources,” the spokesman said. “As a matter of principle, MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) does not comment on leaks.”
Asked if he expected that subsequent WikiLeaks report would contain critical comments about Singapore by other countries, the spokesman said: “There are many thousands of leaked cables from US diplomatic missions all around our region.
“I would be very surprised if Singapore were not the subject of at least some of them. As I said earlier, MFA does not comment on leaks. Singapore takes leaks of confidential information very seriously and would not tolerate them here.”