A U.S.-based international group on Tuesday called on the UN Security Council to refer President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution. The group, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (ISG), which made the call in a statement it circulated at the UN headquarters in New York, described Mugabe’s activities in Zimbabwe as “genocide”. “Mugabe is now committing genocide by attrition,” the scholars said, adding that this fell under the provision of the UN Genocide Convention outlawing acts that “deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part”. “Mugabe’s apparent intention is to destroy his political and ethnic enemies in Zimbabwe,” it stated. Founded in 1994, ISG is an international interdisciplinary scholarly organizatio n that seeks to further research and teach about the nature, causes and consequences of genocide and to advance studies on how to prevent it. A cholera epidemic has claimed as many as 2,000 lives since August.
