Wikileaks – critical cable part of hostile election campaign, claims former FM

Anna Fotyga; photo - PR

“We are dealing here with electoral manipulation. I have no doubt about it, because it is not a coincidence that these cables were leaked when elections [in Poland] are approaching,” Fotyga told the PAP news agency.

Fotyga is referring to a whole batch of cables released at the end of August by Wikileaks on many subjects from diplomats in US Embassies around the world, though picked up yesterday by the Gazeta Wyborcza daily in Poland.

One particular cable from the then US ambassador to Poland, Victor Ashe, was highly critical of Fotyga's weak leadership of the ministry in 2006, noting her lack of foreign policy experience and calling her “media clumsy”.

Fotyga, however, seems to be of the opinion that Julian Assange's web site is working with the liberal Gazeta Wyborcza daily, a newspaper highly critical of her party, Law and Justice, and the leaks are part of a set up ahead of Poland's general election on 9 October.

“The views presented in the dispatches are consistent with the opinions of […] Gazeta Wyborcza,” she said Wednesday.

“It is not clear whether the cables released by Wikileaks are genuine,” she added.

She admitted however that the Foreign Ministry was “very difficult to manage” during part of her time as minister in the Law and Justice-led government, as there was a resistance to her from officials already put in place by a predecessor, Bronislaw Geremek.

Fotyga said that the opinion of the US about her work soon changed after successful negotiations on the EU Lisbon Treaty and President Bush's missile defence shield, since cancelled by the Obama administration.

Pawel Gras, a spokesman for the ruling Civic Platform, and the main rival to Law and Justice in the elections this autumn said: "We don't need Wikileaks to form an opinion of Anna Fotyga". (pg)

see cable here