It is the early 1990s, and a tiny enclave of Christian Armenians is under attack from predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan, which completely surrounds it. This is Nagorno-Karabakh (NK), no bigger than an English county and with a population that could fit into a football stadium.1 For months, the residents have been under artillery bombardment. Many villages have been destroyed with terrible casualties,2 and all land routes into NK have been cut off. Now the only way to get in is by air. But, to avoid heat-seeking missiles, the civilian relief planes have to pretend they are Azerbaijani fighter jets; they have to soar way above their operational ceiling and then corkscrew down with the sun behind them, hoping to confuse the missiles. Under these conditions, not all aid workers make it through,3 but one who did, repeatedly, was a British Baroness, Caroline Cox.

Caroline, a former nurse and academic,4 had been made a “life peer” or member of the House of Lords by Mrs. Thatcher in 1983,5 largely for the work she had done in exposing far Left infiltration of education.6 But she was also a dedicated human rights’ activist, used to getting her hands dirty in difficult settings. For instance, as patron of the Medical Aid for Poland Fund, she traveled with trucks taking medical supplies from Britain into that country during the dark days of its Soviet domination, risking skirmishes with Poland’s secret police. Then, in 1991, at a human rights conference in honor of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, she learned of the ethnic cleansing underway in Nagorno-Karabakh. Within days she had helped pull together a team, contacted Gorbachev for authorization and visas, and flown to Goris, Armenia, where they met refugees from NK.

The stories they heard were appalling,7 and Baroness Cox’s heart was captured. This was the beginning of her long and continuing involvement in the country, which she has now visited almost 70 times and where she has established a rehabilitation center in the capital, Stepanakert. On her trips, she gathers first-hand information to strengthen her advocacy for NK’s suffering population in the House of Lords and in the media. In Nagorno-Karabakh today, the “Baronoohi” is a legend, said to have escaped death some 22 times.

Beyond that and on behalf of Christian Solidarity International (CSI),8 she repeatedly visited Burma to help the largely Christian Karen people, who have suffered terribly at the hands of the Burmese regime.9 Also dear to her heart are the Southern Sudanese (Christians, Muslims, and animists) who have been harassed, tortured, killed, and enslaved by the Islamist regime of the North. During the period 1989-2005, she journeyed into this war zone no fewer than 30 times.

Now over 70 and a grandmother several times over, she shows no sign of slowing down. In 2003 she established the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART)10 to continue her advocacy and aid work amongst the oppressed and persecuted, and she continues to travel tirelessly, speaking out fearlessly on their behalf.

When Caroline was confirmed into the Church of England at age 11, she was given the text Joshua 1:9 (KJV): “Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” She readily admits that there are many times she feels terrified before a mission, but she remembers this verse and realizes she has no option but to go, for God has commanded her to do so.
Footnotes:
1

By 1992 the remaining population of NK was around 140,000. The Azeri population was about 7 million. See Andrew Boyd, Baroness Cox: A Voice for the Voiceless (Oxford: Lion, 1998), 159.
2

One young Armenian woman described the scene to Caroline Cox and colleague John Eibner as follows: “They attacked the village and started cutting the villagers into pieces. I myself heard the screams of a man having his head cut off by a saw… People were cut into pieces, their eyes were gouged out, their ears were cut off.” See report by Caroline Cox and John Eibner, Ethnic Cleansing in Progress: War in Nagorno Karabakh (Institute for Religious Minorities in the Islamic World). Available at Sumgait Website, http://sumgait.info/caroline-cox/ethnic-cleansing-in-progress/contents.htm (accessed April 28, 2009). On one occasion Caroline insisted on villagers exhuming recently buried bodies so she could see, and so report on, such evidence for herself.
3

On one occasion the plane following Caroline’s was raked by machine gun fire; on another trip, a plane with 40 war-wounded took a direct hit. Boyd, 157.
4

Although clever at school, her Christian commitment and compassionate nature saw Caroline opt for nurse training rather than university. An episode of TB, however, forced her to give this up, take a sociology degree as a married woman with young children, and then become an academic at London’s North London Polytechnic.
5

Technically Caroline Cox was made a “working peer” — she was expected to be a spokeswoman for the Conservative Party both in the field of education and in health.
6

In 1972, she was teaching sociology at the Polytechnic of North London, which boasted 7,000 students and an academic staff of 550. Here, a small group of student radicals—members of the Communist Party (CP) or the Trotskyist International Socialists (IS)—aided by some sympathetic members of the staff, were able to intimidate politically moderate academics and students, disrupt teaching, undermine academic standards, and attack all forms of authority. But Cox and her colleagues Keith Jacka and John Marks stood against their incursion, even at the cost of physical and verbal abuse, and they began to champion educational and cultural integrity in Britain. For more details, see Keith Jacka, Caroline Cox, and John Marks, Rape of Reason: The Corruption of the Polytechnic of North London (Middlesex: Churchill, 1975).
7

The group was aware at the time that they also needed the Azeri point of view to have any credibility. Denied permission by the Azeris to fly into Azerbaijan from Armenia, they decided to walk across the border, much against the advice of locals who thought they would be shot at. But waving a big white flag and brandishing their foreign passports, the group managed to get through. Although they collected evidence that Azeri villages had also been destroyed by Armenians, it was clear that there was a massive asymmetry in what was taking place and that the Azeris were the primary aggressors. See Boyd, 127-128.
8

The British branch of CSI eventually split away to form a new organization, Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), so more recently much of Caroline’s human rights work has been for CSW, of which she was for many years president (and remains patron).
9

Again, often with horrific brutality and torture. See Boyd.
10

See Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust Website, http://www.hart-uk.org/ (accessed April 28, 2009). A U.S. branch of HART has been established as well.

adopted from Kairos Jouranl

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located one and a half miles east of Rt. 222.