American Thought Leaders - ‘Heartbreak Land’: Baroness Caroline Cox on Going Where Even the Red Cross Won’t Go

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

“In middle Nigeria, they are attacking—frequently—the Christian villages and townships in the Middle Belt, and that’s gone on for some time, and the attacks are ruthless. And I’ve been to the villages that have suffered an attack from the Islamist Fulani herdsmen, and homes are still burning.”In this episode, I sit down with Baroness Caroline Cox, a member of the British House of Lords and founder of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust.“We have a mandate to heal the sick, feed the hungry, care for the oppressed … Ask God, each one of us, what He wants us to do to fulfill that mandate,” says Baroness Cox.We survey the Baroness’s humanitarian work throughout the globe, and discuss the current political conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which has recently escalated into a dire situation.“I became so concerned about what was really happening to the people from Armenia in this little land of Nagorno-Karabakh, that that began my engagement with that whole area,” says Baroness Cox. “The Armenians are in desperate need of humanitarian aid. All the ones that have had to flee, 100,000 from Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia, they’ve had to leave everything behind.”

In middle Nigeria, they are attacking the Christian villages and townships. And that's gone on for some time. And the attacks are ruthless. I mean, I've been to the villages that have suffered an attack from the Islamist Fulani. And their homes are still burning. In this episode, I sit down with Baroness Caroline Cox, founder of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust and member of the British House of Lords. We have a mandate to heal the sick, feed the hungry, care for the oppressed.

Ask God, each one of us, what he wants us to do to fulfill that mandate. We take a look at the Baroness's humanitarian work throughout the globe and discuss the political conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which has recently escalated into a dire situation for Armenians. The Armenians are in desperate need of humanitarian aid. All the ones that have had to flee 100,000 from Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia, they've had to leave everything behind. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janje Kelleg. Baroness Caroline Cox, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you. It's a great privilege to be here. Well, the privilege is mine, in fact, and I've been actually following your work, especially your humanitarian work, for, I think, at least two decades. And we're going to talk about that. But why don't we actually start here? Tell me a little bit about yourself. All I have to say about myself is I'm actually a nurse and a social scientist by intention and a baroness by astonishment. I was not born a baroness. I was appointed to the House of Lords by Margaret Thatcher and I was the first baroness I'd ever met. But it's quite

a shock because you find yourself in the House of Lords, which is like the upper house in your Congress. And I thought, how do I use this privilege? And the idea came, it's a wonderful place to be a voice for people whose voices are not heard. So that's how I tried to use my role there in the House of Lords, largely with humanitarian aid work for people suffering oppression and persecution, largely unreached by other aid organisations, but also in a different vein on behalf of Muslim women in the United Kingdom who suffer with only having Sharia marriages and not legally registered marriages, and that leaves them very vulnerable. So those are the two threads.

But most of my time is clearly with the humanitarian work with our partners on the front lines of faith and freedom. So I remember from decades ago, there's a few people that I remember. And the people I remember were the ones who took principled stands, very public, principled stands on issues that were decidedly unfashionable. And I think you stand out in that view. And I'm thinking, for example, the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, especially in the early years when, let's call it, the hate propaganda was thick and a lot of Western media were basically picking it up straight up. There were very few

people that were just saying, hey, irrespective of all that, this is wrong. Thank you for that. Well, it's a great privilege. I happen to be a Christian, and I think we have a mandate to be associated with people suffering oppression and persecution and that is a great privilege because they're often heroes and heroines on their front lines of faith. You know you've been working on this you know the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia and atrocities affected by the asberjainis for a long time and just recently you know there was a huge change in the reality of this particular region. I want to make sure I say it correctly, but Nagorno-Karabakh.

Well done. Tell me about that, because that's why you're in DC to talk about this. Indeed. Armenia was the first nation to become Christian, early as 301 AD and some of the oldest Christian churches and traditions in the world in Armenia. And then Stalin, with his salami tactics, cut off part of ancient Armenia, Christian Armenia, and stuck it as what was called an oblast inside Azerbaijan. And that little oblast, or bit of ancient Armenia isolated in Azerbaijan, is called Nagorno-Karabakh. And

it's got some of the oldest churches in the world there. But relatively recently, Azerbaijan has increased its persecution of the Christians living in that little land. It's been on and off for many years. But in December of last year, Azerbaijan cut off the road which links Armenia to this little land of Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan. And it's the only route in which medical supplies and food could come and so on. So Armenians were suffering very badly in Nagorno-Karabakh for much of this year. And I've seen a photograph of one man who died of starvation. I'm sure many people suffered really seriously, elderly people, babies,

pregnant women and so on. And then Azerbaijan upped the aggression against the Armenians in Lugano-Karabakh when it began bombing them. It bombed them before, but bombed them again. And the Armenians really had to flee for their lives and began the process of what is legitimately called ethnic cleansing. Over 100,000 Armenians had to flee from Azerbaijan into Armenia itself. And they could only carry with them what they could carry. They couldn't take their possessions. They had to leave their homes, everything, and just flee into Armenia. And that was just very recently. And that ethnic

cleansing has left that little land of Nagorno-Karabakh bereft. There are only about 40 Armenians left still there. And it is a very serious and tragic situation. Hundred thousand Armenians have had to flee from their homeland into Armenia. And it's a very difficult situation. Armenia is not a big country, not a wealthy Armenia. And it's a very difficult situation. I mean, it's not a big country, not a wealthy country, and it's now had this huge influx of people. I may just say there's one other aspect of what's going on, which is very serious and which needs a lot of prayer, if I may say so. Azerbaijan has also captured, imprisoned quite a lot of innocent Armenians, some from a previous war in 2020, which was a short war, and there

were some prisoners of war from there. But more recently, they've just abducted and imprisoned civilians. And some of the leaders, and I know them personally, and there needs to be a lot of pressure on Azerbaijan to release those prisoners it's holding illegally. Right. I would love it if you could just kind of explain your involvement with that region and just because the changes that happened recently are dramatic. And also tell me about your organization, HART, which I understand, you know, basically goes places where the

Red Cross will not go. Well, very briefly, I became involved with Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, goes right back. I'm very old, so it was a long time ago. And I was at a conference in Moscow. It was a very big international conference, probably about the first human rights conference to be held in Moscow in the emergence of Russia from the Soviet Union. And there was a very famous person there, the name may be familiar, Yelena Bonasakharov. Her husband was a very famous human rights activist, Andrei Sakharov.

He had departed, but it was a late Yelena Bonasakharov, and a wonderful inspirational person, passionate on human rights. And she told us about the situation that was going on in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. And to cut a long story short, I was asked to lead a delegation, international delegation, down to the area. It was the first time I visited Armenia. And we visited there, and we heard about what the people were suffering in this little land of Nagorno-Karabakh. And we did actually go up and walk across the border, with no prior permission, it was a bit risky, into Azerbaijan, because we always have to hear two points of view. If you don't get two points of view, a lot of the media coverage

won't cover you because it thinks it's partisan. And so we did actually walk across the border into Azerbaijan, which was interesting, carrying some white flags, which was interesting, but we survived. But that was the first time, and I became so concerned about what was really happening to the people from Armenia in this little land, Nagorno-Karabakh, that that began my engagement with that whole area. And I have since traveled there many times. I don't count, but I've been told by those who do count that it's 88 times Nagorno-Karabakh, 90 times into Armenia, two times I couldn't go into Karabakh. It might not be obvious to people why this hostility. Do you have a sense of why?

Well, Azerbaijan, I think, has unfortunately a track record of hostility and of brutal treatment. And it has the president, President Aliyev is the president of Azerbaijan, and he has declared his intention to access Nagorno-Karabakh entirely, but also to annihilate the Armenians who are living there. And more recently, very worryingly, he has threatened to invade Armenia itself. Now, Azerbaijan is extremely wealthy with oil and other resources, has very well-resourced military capacity, and they're already building up quite worryingly along the line of the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. And it has carried out military offensives against the Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh, and it is extremely serious.

But President Aliyev has said that Azerbaijan will occupy Armenia itself, Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, Lake Savan, a beautiful lake inside Armenia, historically inside Armenia. He's actually said they will belong to Azerbaijan. And it is important to challenge President Aliyev's lies with the truth. It's a kind of a land grab then. Is that how you view it? Well, Azerbaijan certainly with its intention, it has already succeeded in taking Nagorno-Karabakh and driving the ethnic Armenians out of it. And not so long ago in September, I was in Armenia and I visited a town in Armenia which is going up towards the border with Azerbaijan, a town called Goris, which is a long-established Armenian town. But from that town, you could see up a hillside an encampment by Azerbaijan

already there. There were three Azerbaijan emplacements already there with impunity. So it is already getting away with encroaching into Armenian sovereign territory with impunity, and that's very worrying. So what is your intention here? Well, we're trying to raise both aid and advocacy. On the aid side, as I mentioned earlier, the Armenians are in desperate need of humanitarian aid. All the ones that have had to flee 100,000 from Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia. They've had to leave everything behind because they're in great need. But also we have one particular focus, and that is we have a hero.

I call him a hero of the peace. And he established a rehabilitation center inside Nagorno-Karabakh. He's called Vardar Tadevosian. And the rehabilitation center was so superb, he developed it with his staff. It became internationally renowned as a centre of excellence. People came from around the world to see it. When I was there not so long ago, there was someone there from Japan. People came from Africa to see it. And Vardens had to leave that, which is heartbreaking, but hopes to re-establish another center of excellence inside Armenia itself.

And that's going to cause funding. So we're trying to raise money for a new rehabilitation center, a replacement for the one that's stranded in Nagorno-Karabakh in Armenia itself. For the sake of people with disabilities, it will actually be very good for Armenia's reputation as well. It's very, very precious. So that's the humanitarian side. And on the advocacy side, we are trying to encourage nations and pressure groups and people who respect and cherish freedom and truth to be advocates for freedom and truth and to call Azerbaijan to account for its appalling annihilation, if you like, of the Armenian existence in the little land of Nagorno-Karabakh and their threats to extend their role into Armenia

itself. And so we're here for advocacy and also advocacy for those people who are imprisoned in Azerbaijan who desperately need to be freed. What has the response been like? Yeah, wonderful. I mean, people have received this very graciously and responded very positively. I do raise these issues in the British Parliament. I know they're raised in the US Congress. So I hope that we will receive

some of the desperately needed funding for the rehabilitation centre, for the Armenians who've had to flee, leaving everything behind them. And so aid and advocacy. So tell me a little bit about, you know, HART, your organization. What does it mean to go to a place where the Red Cross won't go? In the very early days, way back in the 1980s, I was appointed to the House of Lords in 83, I can't believe it, 40 years ago. Anyway, in the early decade, I did a lot of work for Poland, because Poland

was in the very dark days of martial law in those days, and I did a lot of work, the very good organization Medical Aid for Poland Fund. And we took medical aid in. I went many times on the trucks speaking for the Polish people who were suffering at the hands of communism. And that emerged, praise God, into freedom in 89. And then I did a lot of work in Russia with Soviet orphans who were having a horrific time and helped to establish programs for enabling children to be kept in care homes or homes for orphaned children. And then I decided that I wanted to diversify. So I founded HART, which stands for Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust.

And HART is established to try to provide aid and advocacy for people suffering persecution and oppression in areas not reached by other major aid organizations either for political reasons or security reasons because the big organizations like you and I have great respect for them but they can only go with permission of a sovereign government for sovereign government is victimizing a minority in its own borders doesn't allow them then they can't go. So we do spend quite a

lot of our time going a bit unofficially. We work with local partners and they're the heroes and heroines. But on the security side most of them are in war zones or conflict zones of some kind and it's quite dangerous getting there. And other aid organisations quite rationally may be a little bit nervous about that and I can understand that for their staff and their whole raison d'etre. But we do go where it may be politically incorrect and where it may be dangerous. And so a lot of our partners are in conflict zones in areas where they're not supported by their national governments.

And we do provide aid and advocacy, and many of them are actually suffering violations of human rights. Do you have one sort of particular success you'd like to share with me from these years of doing this work? That's a good question. Well, yes, I think we do. One or two of the areas where we work in heart, we now no longer need to work there, because when we first started there, the population, the civilians, suffered from the criteria which Hart tries to address. And one of those, way back, was in northern Uganda.

And we went there in the dark days when the Lord's Resistance Army was active and was attacking civilians, and it was hell on earth, I can tell you. And the first time I went there, I went with a good colleague, and it was really dangerous getting there, and dangerous when we were there. But we asked the local people, what's your priority? We always ask people their priority. We don't tell them what we're going to do. We ask them, because they know their priorities.

And they said, please, help for orphans. there are so many orphans because the parents have been killed and have had to flee and so on and those little skeletons is all that they were to cut a long story short we managed to provide a food aid and other aid for those orphans and we also helped find them parental care and so on to care for those orphans in a holistic way. And if you go there now, I can't believe it, but just one little vignette, those kids are now teenagers. And there was recently a tournament in Africa, a football tournament.

A lot of African countries took part. And a little team from our Orphan Patonga program took part and they won the tournament. And they were so talented that the United States chose one of those football players, kids, to go to the States here to develop a proper professional football program, and Britain selected another. So from being little orphans who were like little skeletons to being such competent football players in their teens

that they were actually selected to represent their countries or to attend other countries for training is, I think, an example. And we no longer need that orphan program now. It has been successful. All the orphans have been happily placed with families. And that was a very happy outcome to a very tragic situation. We get so caught up in thinking about the many big, big issues that we have. Sometimes I have some very bad days, but little small wins for these kids.

This is all the difference. And a sports team, apparently. Thank you for sharing that. The other thing I know you do advocate for places where you can't go very easily to inspect, so to speak. And I know that you were involved in a coalition to investigate the persecution of Falun Gong in China, and you've actually taken your own government to task around the forced organ harvesting issue. I mentioned aid and advocacy, and they're obviously closely entwined. But there are issues where I think we do need to defend freedom and fundamental values, and that's

part of a Christian mandate and part of our mandate. And maybe one of the areas where we border, if you like, between the controversial and the fundamental principle is maybe Nigeria. We do a lot of work in Middle Belt Nigeria, with sort of Jos Patou State to the north, going down to Abuja, the capital. And the Islamist Fulani—I always make a distinction between Islam and Islamism. Islam is Muslims, moderate Muslims, friends, so on. Islamism are the Islamists, and they are the ones who carry out the brutal attacks. In middle Nigeria, they are attacking frequently the Christian villages and townships in Middlebelt.

And that's gone on for some time. And the attacks are ruthless. I mean, I've been to the villages that have suffered an attack from the Islamist Fulani, the Fulani herdsmen. And their homes are still burning. You've seen the corpses before they're buried. And it is a hell on earth. And I remember one occasion when I was there, and they were just recovering from an attack,

and I met a young mother, and she tried to flee with her little six-year-old daughter. But the village had been surrounded by the Islamist Fulani. They couldn't escape. They were caught. They slashed her across the shoulder with a machete. And then they cut her little daughter's throat. And she fainted having been tapped by the machete. And when she woke up, her little six-year-old daughter was lying dead next

to her. And inside the little daughter's mouth was her mother's finger. They cut her mother's finger off and stuck it inside her mouth. I mean, heartbreak, heartbreak land. But those attacks on Christian villages in Middleburg, Nigeria, are still going on. And one of our aid responses, we always ask the local people, and they said there are one and a half million people displaced from these villages and these little townships and their children are desperate for education, desperate. So we have what are called Roads to Hope education bands and we take education supplies to those kids who are displaced and you could see the joy on their faces, on the kids' faces when these education bans arrive.

And they're not just books. They're computers and all sorts of things which they need for proper education. Here's hope for the future. And what a privilege to be able to do that. And we're now just diversifying a little into also providing health care bans for the displaced people in Middle Belt, Nigeria. And we've, of course, covered this extensively, this whole situation. It's hard to fathom another one of these, you know, realities that just, I guess, a lot of people don't want to, you know, they

don't know and maybe they don't want to know because it's so horrific and it continues to this day. Absolutely, it's happening while we're talking here today. Right. Well, Baroness Cox, it's such a pleasure to speak with you. Any final thoughts as we finish? Just I think to share that those of us who have freedom and those who have relative plenty, we do have an obligation to share what we have with those people who are suffering, people who are dying from starvation or from lack of medical care. And I think we must learn to look beyond our comfort zone, to be alongside those people. Obviously, in prayer, we have a mandate to heal the sick, feed the hungry, care for the oppressed.

And I just think my passion would be, ask God, each one of us, what he wants us to do to fulfill that mandate. Well, Baroness Caroline Cox, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Well, it's been a privilege to be with you. Thank you for letting me share the pain and the passion and the privilege of being able to make a little bit of a difference. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Baroness Caroline Cox and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.