November 3, 2008
KAFR QADDUM, West Bank (AFP) — For a number of years, volunteers have joined Palestinian farmers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to help pick olives and provide some form of protection against increasingly violent attacks by settlers.

"We do this because we want to defend Palestinians' rights to their land," said Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann, of the Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights which organises volunteer teams to work in olive groves where Palestinian farmers are under potential threat.

"As a last resort we stand between Palestinian farmers and the settlers," said Grenimann, who was born in Australia of Holocaust survivors.

Around him, half a dozen volunteers, most of them Israelis, plucked olives -- some with their fingers, others using small plastic rakes -- which they dropped onto tarpaulins laid out on the rocky ground.

That day's harvest, also just outside Qedumim, went smoothly until it was halted by a heavy downpour. In several cases it is settler attacks that prevent farmers and volunteers from picking olives in the West Bank.

"It has become worse," said Hellela Siew, 64, who has travelled from Britain for the past six year to take part in the annual harvest of the tiny fruit that is a mainstay of the West Bank economy and has come to symbolise Palestinian nationhood, not to mention peace.

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By Louise Watts
LONDON (AP) — The conflict in eastern Congo is being fueled and funded by a tussle for mineral resources that end up in cell phones, laptops and other electronics — deepening the stakes in a war that sprung out of festering hatreds from the Rwandan genocide.

Rebel militias and Congolese army troops are fighting each other for control of mineral-rich land. They can then sell the raw materials they mine and use the proceeds to fund their activities and arms — which prolongs the conflict.

"The links are very clear between the mining activity going to finance these groups, and these armed groups we know have been benefiting financially from the mining areas," said Lizzie Parsons, a member of the Congo team at London-based Global Witness, a non-governmental organization that investigates natural resource exploitation.

Congo's present conflict stems from a rebellion started four years ago by renegade general Laurent Nkunda, who claimed the country's transition to democracy had excluded the Tutsi ethnic group. Despite agreeing in January to a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, he resumed fighting in August.

He alleges the Congolese government has not protected ethnic Tutsis from the Rwandan Hutu militia that escaped to Congo after helping slaughter half a million Rwandan Tutsis in 1994.

But analysts say that the heart of conflict is the struggle for minerals.

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