BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) – Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit on Sunday reiterated the need for the Caribbean to be a zone of peace, warning that any military action now will have severe consequences for the entire region.

Addressing the 86th annual conference of the ruling Barbados Labour Party (BLP), Skerrit echoed a similar call made by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley for an end to the military build-up by United State off the coast of Venezuela, ostensibly to fight the illegal drugs trade.

“We have to be counted, we cannot cower under fear, we have to stand for principle and stand on the shoulders of the sacrifices of our foreparents who fought for our freedom and who fought for our independence,” Skerrit said.

He told his audience that he had extracted parts of Prime Minister Mottley’s speech, placing it in the social media page of Caribbean Community (Caricom) leaders.

“We must always speak truth to power and your speech yesterday was absolutely truth to power, representing what …this great country stands for and what our foreparents had fought for so many generations.

“And so we stand with you on this and this Caribbean must continue to be a zone of peace. We do not want any war in our region. We solve problems by discussions, dialogue, diplomacy and we sometimes have to agree to disagree. But we must do so peacefully and with respect for each other,” Skerrit said. He warned that “if a war breaks out in the Caribbean we will have some serious challenges in our respective countries”.

Skerrit insisted there is an opportunity to “prevent this from happening by adding our voices that reason prevail and common sense come to our being and let us work out our problems together”.

In her speech on day-one of the conference, Prime Minister Mottley said the region is now facing “an extremely dangerous and an untenable situation in the southern Caribbean and as a people with a tragic history of being subjected to centuries of big power orchestrated genocide, terrorism and warfare and as a small state, we have invested tremendous time and energy…in establishing and maintaining our region as a zone of peace”.

“Peace is critical to all that we do in this region and now that peace is being threatened we have to speak up,” Mottley said, thanking former prime ministers for the “very strong statement issued by them for the fundamental principle that was agreed upon the formation of the Caribbean Community.

“I want to thank them because without their statement we are possibly going to have others think that those who now lead governments are speaking in vain without reflecting on the fact that this has been a core principle of the Caribbean Community from its very inception”.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, prime ministers,” Mottley said, adding that she believes the time has come for the region not to accept that any entity “has the right to engage in extrajudicial killings of persons they suspect of being involved in criminal activities”.

An attorney-at-law, Mottley said … “we stand for the rule of law, and we believe if there is other intelligence available that would cause you to take action that is an immediate threat to you as a nation, then you have a duty to share it with us”.

“But on the face of it, conflating law enforcement with military action is a dangerous step,” Mottley said, adding “we equally do not accept that any nation in our region or the greater Caribbean should be the subject of an imposition upon them of any unilateral expression of force and violence by any third party or nation”.

Last week, the Donald Trump Administration announced that it is intensifying its military build-up in the Caribbean with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth ordering the deployment of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford and its carrier air wing to the Caribbean, in aid of what the administration says is its counter-drug initiative.

Washington claims the enhanced US force presence in the US Southern Command Area of Responsibility will bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and its security in the Western Hemisphere.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has deployed several warships and over 10,000 troops to the Caribbean in what pundits claim is a pretext for an eventual land invasion of Venezuela.

Nearly 40 people have been killed in at least eight strikes on boats and a submersible in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific. The US claims the victims are narco traffickers but has provided no proof to substantiate the allegations.