Why the Singapore Government decided to declassify The Albatross File

That period from Merger to Separation holds lasting lessons for Singapore. The following is an abridged version of the speech given by Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the launch of The Albatross File exhibition on Dec 7.

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The main contours of the story of Separation have long been well known. Tunku Abdul Rahman, the Malaysian Prime Minister then, recounted some of them in his 1977 memoirs, Looking Back. More information emerged as British, Australian and New Zealand diplomatic cables and reports of that period were declassified from the early 1990s onwards. Mr Lee Kuan Yew told the story from his perspective in his memoirs, The Singapore Story, relying on some of the same documents we are releasing today, as well as oral histories that he and his close colleagues had recorded in the early 1980s. Historians have also written about Separation. Professor Albert Lau's definitive account, A Moment Of Anguish, appeared in 1998, the same year as Mr Lee's The Singapore Story.

Still, the core of this book - The Albatross File - is something that has not previously been put out. It contains important documents from the period, most of which have not been published before. It was created, named and kept by Dr Goh Keng Swee, then the Minister for Finance. Dr Goh felt that Malaysia had become an albatross around Singapore's neck. He was alluding to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.

For a period the file was lost, before it was found in a storeroom in the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) in the early 1980s. It was discovered by Dr Tan Kay Chee, a MINDEF officer who had then interviewed Dr Goh and some of our founding leaders for an oral history project on the political history of Singapore. Dr Goh relied on the file in his own oral history interviews, and read into the record several of the documents in the file. But for Dr Tan's efforts and fortunate discovery, this precious record might have been lost to history, and we would have been all the poorer for it. The public first learnt of the existence of the file in 1996, after Dr Goh mentioned it in an interview with Dr Melanie Chew for her book Leaders of Singapore.