The United Workers Party (UWP) in Dominica is refuting claims that it is responsible for the cancellation of the Dominica Labour Party Salisbury Campaign event.

The ruling DLP in Dominica decided to cancel a political campaign that was carded for Tuesday night in the Salisbury community because the party said it feared for the life of its supporters.

They claimed that the UWP had threatened to block roads and prevent the DLP rally.

But the UWP said in a press statement said 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,” the UWP said.

The UWP believes that 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 party added.

Adding, “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.

The UWP said the request for an apology posed no threat to the DLP’s campaign activities in Salisbury or anywhere else in Dominica, as the DLP itself has confirmed: “We shall nonetheless continue our campaign in every village, in every part of the Salisbury Constituency”.

The accusations leveled against the UWP by the DLP according to the party 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 are calling for unity in opposing the sham election through legitimate protest action,”, the statement added.

The party is also requesting 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,”