In my course on ethnic nationalism at UPEI, 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 unrecognized.
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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Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
