• by IPS Correspondents (london)
• Friday, December 16, 1994
• Inter Press Service

LONDON, Dic 16 (IPS) - Amid the barrage of media coverage of the ethnic slaughter which raged in Rwanda this year between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples, the name Twa barely registered a mention.

Yet Rwanda's third tribe also suffered enormously in the fighting, according to Survival International, a worldwide movement which supports tribal peoples.

One of the pygmy peoples of central Africa, the Twa are discriminated against by both Hutu and Tutsi, says the group. It is difficult to determine how many of the estimated 29,000 Twa survived the war.

A current fact-finding mission in Rwanda by the Netherlands- based Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO), suggests that in some villages up to 80 percent of the Twa population have been killed or are still missing.

"Politically, they didn't take a position on the fighting and would have tried to stay aloof," says Survival spokesperson Virginia Luling. Yet often they were targeted as sympathisers of the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front, and simultaneously accused of having sided with the Hutu extremist Interahamwe group.

"There have been reports of Twa involvement in the killings, but we think largely they were forced to join in," says Luling.

"Like all small marginal groups, they were manipulated," says Alex de Waal, director of the human rights monitor Africa Rights. "During the genocide against Tutsis, they were used by the Hutu to kill and rape. And they weren't treated any better by the Tutsis."

Even before the latest violence erupted, the Twa, also known as Batwa, were a disadvantaged group living on the margins of Rwandan society, eking out a living as landless labourers or pot makers.

When the land-owning, cattle-owing Tutsi ruled the country they extended their patronage to the Twa hunter-gatherers, who provided their community with musicians, court jesters, executioners and general servants. But Luling says the Hutu, traditionally a farming community, resented Twa 'advantages' under the Tutsis.

Their position worsened when the Hutus took power after Rwanda gained independence from Belgium in 1962, she says. In one incident in the early 80s the Twa Impunyu group in the Gishwati region lost their homes under a World Bank-backed forest clearance scheme to make way for tea plantations and pasture.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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