UWP Denies any Involvement in the Postponement of DLP’s Salisbury Rally

The United Workers Party (UWP) views with great concern a recent press statement issued by the Dominica Labour Party (DLP) dated November 29, 2022, which blames our party for the cancellation of a proposed DLP rally in Salisbury that same day. In the view of the UWP, this is “a desperate attempt by Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit and the party that he leads, to fool international election observers into believing that the main opposition party is interfering with his highly toxic campaign of lies, deception and propaganda ahead of elections on December 6th, 2022.”

It is important that we remind the public that the UWP is not participating in the 2022 elections because of the following:

• it represents a betrayal of the trust of the people of Dominica who were led by the Prime Minister to believe there would not be another election in the country before the reform of the electoral process to remove the taints, that poisoned it into delivering unfair results in 2009, 2014 and 2019; and
• it confirms the unrelenting assault of Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit on the fundamental right of the people to elect their government through free and fair elections with integrity.

Undoubtedly, the Prime Minister wants the international election observers to believe that he is involved in a legitimate electoral contest, so he is falsely accusing the UWP of interfering with his campaign in a constituency he has brutally victimized and which the DLP has never won since the birth of the UWP 34 years ago. The people of Salisbury recognize the right of the few supporters of the Dominica Labour Party in the constituency to freely assemble, associate, and participate in the election process.

The request by some within the community for an apology from the DLP for teargassing sleeping residents on the morning before the general election of 2019, and trying to murder, imprison and impoverish them, is an invitation to engage civility and justice in our interactions as one people, one Nation. Indeed, the request for an apology posed absolutely no threat to the DLP’s campaign activities in Salisbury or anywhere else in Dominica, as the DLP itself has clearly confirmed: “We shall nonetheless continue our campaign in every village, in every part of the Salisbury Constituency”.

The accusations levelled against the UWP by the DLP could very well create disruption leading to violence, the destruction of property and loss of lives. The attention of the international community is rightly focused on Dominica at a time when the people continue to call for electoral reforms. We ask the international election observers to note that other political parties and civil society organizations (both in Dominica and the Diaspora) are calling for unity in opposing the sham election through legitimate protest action.

We need and therefore humbly request the good offices of the organizations monitoring the election process to take note of the DLP’s attempts to mislead the people of Dominica and to unnecessarily heighten tensions during this period.

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