In the
undergraduate course I teach on ethnic nationalism, a student recently gave a presentation
on the horrific Rwandan genocide of 1994.
It was organized by members of the Hutu political elite, at the
top levels of the national government. More than 800,000 people, mostly from the minority Tutsi community, were
murdered while the world stood by.
But few
people know that another small ethnic group in the country was also caught up
in the carnage.
The Twa can be considered the forgotten victims of the
Rwandan war and genocide; their suffering has gone largely unrecognised.
They number just one per cent of the country’s people and claim
to be the original inhabitants of Rwanda.
Despite their limited numbers, there was a widespread Hutu
perception that the Twa were sympathetic to Tutsis, reinforced by the
involvement of some Twa in neighbouring Burundi with the Tutsi in that country.
About 10,000 people, more than a third of the Twa population
of Rwanda, were killed and a similar number fled the country as refugees.
Rwanda’s post-genocide constitution rejects ethnic
classifications; it commits itself to “fighting the ideology of genocide.” It aims
for “the eradication of ethnic, regional and other divisions and promotion of
national unity.”
In 2004 the Rwandan
Justice Ministry refused to grant legal status to the Twa-rights NGO Communauté
des Autochtones Rwandaises (CAURWA, Community of Indigenous People of Rwanda)
unless it stopped identifying the Twa as Rwanda’s first inhabitants.
Because ethnic terminology is banned in Rwanda, the Twa are
officially referred to as historically marginalized people. They are without a
name.
Following the genocide, there was discrimination against Twa
survivors in the distribution of food and other supplies. They were also not
recognized in post-conflict reparations frameworks in Rwanda.
The government of Rwanda cut off assistance to the Twa if
they continued to consider themselves a distinct people.
Rwanda established a fund in 1998 for genocide survivors. “When
we tried to get money from the fund for survivors, we were told that our
families must have been killed by accident because the genocide only targeted
the Tutsi,” said Shaban Munyarukundo, a member of a Twa advocacy group.
Social and economic integration of Twa in Rwandan society is
extremely limited; they remain disadvantaged in education, healthcare, and land
rights.
Twa communities have higher infant mortality rates, shorter
average lifespans and higher rates of disease and malnutrition than their Hutu
and Tutsi neighbours.
Activists say that more than 90 per cent of the
community is now landless. Even though Rwanda’s economy is one of Africa’s
fastest-growing, most Twa live in abject poverty.
In 2017 the UN Committee for the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women expressed concern at ongoing marginalization of
and discrimination against Twa women.
The Twa were killed in even greater proportion than the
Tutsi during the genocide yet cannot commemorate their dead because they fear being
arrested for “ethnic divisionism.”
“All that was left of
the Twa after the genocide were orphans and old ladies,” remarked Jerome Lewis,
co-director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability at University
College London.
“In proportion, they suffered more than any other group, and
yet there’s not a single memorial.”
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