CAROLINE COX

Lady Cox ("please call me Caroline") has been
accused of being a secret agent because of her ability
to enter countries whose oppressive governments are intent
on keeping her out.

NEVER ALONE

Baroness Cox of Queensbury, has often done what was not expected. Her father, Robert John McNeill Love, a London surgeon and the coauthor of the classical medical reference, A Short Practice of Surgery, expected Caroline would take a place in university. Instead she chose to go to nursing school.

After qualifying, Caroline began her professional life as a nurse. Working the midnight shift in a London hospital in the summer, she meets Murray, a young intern, and slips away with him during their breaks to meet outside in a rhubarb patch. Caroline and Murray Cox marry, and have two sons and a daughter. Her life is busy and full. Then she is diagnosed with tuberculosis. She is forced to take time off, and her enforced rest gives her fresh ideas.

Caroline decides to get a sociology degree. Studying at night so she can take care of her children by day, she graduates with First class honours in sociology from London University, and with a Masters Degree in Economics from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She moves into academia to teach. Here the powers that be expect her to adopt the latest politically fashionable thought – to become one of the intellectual elites who trashes democracy while talking up Marxist-Leninism at public expense.

Appalled at the economic theories being forced on her students, Caroline attacks the citadel, battling for freedom of speech and inquiry. The response is immediate. She experiences almost nine years of relentless intimidation by tyrannical university Marxists. Surprising her tormentors, Caroline describes their tactics, co-authoring The Rape of Reason. Her book has the unexpected effect of light in darkness, in so far as political thinking in Britain is concerned.

In the late 1970s Caroline became Director of the Nursing Education Research Unit at Chelsea College of the University of London, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1982, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher recalled The Rape of Reason, saw the work Caroline had done, and recommended that she be made a working peer.

To her surprise, Caroline becomes Baroness Cox of Queensbury, and enters the House of Lords. Here it is expected she will sit on the red leather pews under the high arched windows in the panelled and gilded chamber, listening respectfully to her colleagues and asking an intelligent question or two. Instead, almost immediately she sets off in a 32-ton truck for Communist Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union, bringing medical supplies.

Behind the Iron Curtain

She had also packed blank computer paper, infuriating her driver when he discovered it. He asked her if she realized they could be imprisoned if the paper is found. “In a totalitarian state, blank paper is dangerous,” he shouted. “You can write ideas on it.”

Caroline sees his point, and finds another way of spreading ideas. Risking imprisonment, she meets with members of the Polish Solidarity movement, and carries their ideas and hopes with her, in her head. Then she uses her newly gained fame as a member of the House of Lords to speak publicly about the Polish people's struggle for freedom. With her husband's unqualified support, Caroline defies fashionable pieties about communism, and calls openly for Soviet regime change from the upper house of Parliament at the height of the Cold War. Her daring work earns her Poland's highest award for a foreigner, the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit.

Visiting the Soviet Union, Caroline meets small, intelligent children who are being warehoused as mentally handicapped because they are orphans. Returning to Britain she writes and publishes the report, "Trajectories of Despair". As the Soviet Union crumbles, Russian medical and social service officials, at last able to speak, welcome her ideas, and start acting on her report. With her help, they reform the system of child care, and establish family-style foster care and adoption.

In retrospect these trips behind the Iron Curtain into Eastern Europe will seem comparatively easy compared to her subsequent missions. Caroline believes that she must use the gift of freedom on behalf of those who have been deprived of liberty. She aims to learn the truth, to speak it, and to help the most vulnerable men, women, and children on earth. But to do this she has to walk into darkness.

Into Armenia

She remarks that she does not feel the darkness of fear in the unhappy countries she visits, where she can be blown to bits, but in the relative serenity of Britain before she leaves on her next trip. At home, she faces her fears that she will be killed. As she admits to Benedict Rogers of CRISIS, “Home is very comfortable, with clean water, electric light, warmth, clean clothes. To wrench yourself away and go voluntarily into a conflict zone, you recoil against it."

Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest (Joshua 1:9).

Her husband Murray has became a senior psychiatrist at the hospital for the criminally insane, Broadmoor. He is developing theatre and music therapy for his patients. (One of his many books is Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor.) Murray is concerned about her safety, but behind her all the way. "Only where there is great danger can there flourish that which saves," he promises her.

There is plenty of danger. She travels to Armenia, an ancient land of mountains, forests, and fertile valleys, ancient churches and monasteries whose people welcomed Christ's apostles, Thaddaeus and Bartholomew, in AD 1st century. Armenians maintained their integrity as one people over two thousand years despite assaults by the Persian, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. Bounded on the east by Azerbaijan and on the west by Turkey and Iran, they survived the implosion of the Soviet empire to become an independent, pro-democratic, free-market nation. Their hospitality to visitors is legendary.

Nagorno Karabakh is a part of Armenia that was cruelly and malevolently cut off from the Armenian homeland by the mass murderer Stalin when he controlled the Soviet Union. The Armenians in the enclave of Nagorno Karabakh are surrounded. They are being relentlessly attacked in their villages by violent Islamists from Azerbaijan, and no one in the world seems to care. Little girls are cut in half, and hung on trees. Young men are beheaded. Homes are burned down.

As Caroline flies into Nagorno Karabakh at the height of the conflict, her helicopter is shot down. She has a desperate, "sacramental moment", suspended between life and death as the pilot fights to bring his crew, passenger, and supplies down safely. When he finally makes a soft landing in snow, she scrambles out to complete her mission.

Caroline makes fifty-eight journeys to Armenia to bring medical supplies, to learn the truth, and to alert the world. Meeting the Armenians who had experienced unspeakable acts of violence, she was inspired by their "dignity, courage, and faith", by their willingness to forgive. By her 60th trip, the violence has ended. Much work remains to be done, but there is hope that reconciliation is underway.

Into the Sudan

Along with the rise of violent Islamists, the most under-reported story of the 1990s and Second Millennium is the ruthless persecution of Christians around the world. Christians are being killed, imprisoned, and tortured in China, where many of them are also advocates for freedom and democracy; in Saudi Arabia, where it is illegal to be Christian and where thousands of Christians have been jailed; in Egypt, where Christians have been discriminated against, kidnapped, and killed; and in Morocco, Iran, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Nigeria, and the Sudan, where the Islamic government has murdered hundreds of thousands of Christians.

Ducking bullets, Caroline subsists on military rations (she likes the inexpensive, vacuum-packed MREs from the States with their miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce), and sleeps in tents as she travels through jungles, over unbridged rivers, across mountains, and into the desert. She is serving as a nurse and a witness, and becoming a voice for embattled peoples in Burma, Indonesia, Nigeria, and the Sudan who have no voice, and who are being raped, enslaved, and murdered. What she seeks is to learn the truth on the ground, with her own eyes. She goes secretly to places and countries off-limits to foreigners and aid organisations.

The racist Arab Sudanese government has given China unfettered access to their oil in exchange for money and weapons. The government has bought bombers, assault helicopters, and armoured vehicles from the Chinese and funded the brutal Janjaweed militia to kill civilians based on their ethnicity, rape women, and steal land, goods, and herds of livestock. This is what the world calls the Darfur genocide. Over 2 million civilians have been displaced. The death toll is estimated at 400,000 killed.

Caroline reaches Bahr-el-Gazal with a cameraman, and finds that just days before the National Islamic Front has swept through, slaughtering unarmed men and enslaving women and children. “Bodies were piled high, rotting. We went to an area of sheer carnage – human bodies, cattle corpses, burned homes, scorched-earth policy.”

They find a catechist wandering in the desolation. He has seen his church attacked, his brother and brother-in-law killed and his sister captured as a slave.

Standing in the dust of his destroyed farm, he describes the men paid by the Sudanese Government to kill his people. Then he hesitates. The worst thing, he says, is “we feel completely on our own. You are the only Christians who have even visited us for years." Softly he asks, “Doesn’t the Church want us anymore?”

Caroline and the seasoned television journalist with her were devastated by his question. “He sat by the river and wept, and I sat under a tree and wept."

They brought news of the carnage to the West. For illegally entering Sudan, Caroline was sentenced in absentia by the National Islamic Front. Despite her efforts and the condemnation of the world, the Islamic government of Sudan continues to murder defenceless civilians, and the UN is seemingly incapable of stopping them.

Caroline carries the shining courage of Sudanese Christians before her as she makes repeated, dangerous trips back to the Sudan. Their valour can be heard in the words of the exiled Catholic Bishop Macram Gassis, speaking outdoors to his people in southern Sudan:

This most beautiful cathedral, not built with human hands, but by nature and by God, is filled with the people of God. We must tell our brothers and sisters that the people here are still full of hope and that they still smile, in spite of suffering and persecution. Your people have suffered slavery, but you are not slaves to the world but children of God who has told us we can call him “Abba, Father.” Christianity gives us liberty; therefore we are no longer slaves, but free: children of liberty, freedom, and truth.

But we live in a bad world. Many of your people have been sold into slavery. But that is not to become a slave. . . The real slave is a slave to sin; who does injustice to brothers and sisters; who kills them. Some people feel naked because they have no clothes, and they try to cover themselves because of their embarrassment. But this is not real nakedness. True nakedness is to be without love. Therefore be clothed in love. This is Christianity.

Caroline is criticized for purchasing the freedom of some Dinka and Nuer people who have been enslaved. Apparently it is easier to lambaste the person who tries desperately to help free a slave, rather than condemning the enslavers. It is worth recalling that when Muslim pirates enslaved an estimated 1.5 million European Christians between the 16th and 18th centuries, Cervantes was one of those ransomed after being enslaved for five years.

Caroline is attacked for her straight talk about violent Islamists, who have brought suffering to many parts of the world. In 2003, with physicist and educator Dr. John Marks, she writes a little book called The ‘West’, Islam and Islamism. Is ideological Islam compatible with liberal democracy?

Caroline and Marks challenge the free world, including moderate Muslims, to take the threats from violent Islamists seriously, and respond. Her concern that Britain will experience the horror she has seen elsewhere proves prophetic in July 2005 when violent Islamists bomb London transport, injuring hundreds and killing seventy. Caroline also causes a sensation when she helps to publicize a book by a Nigerian missionary who writes that Britain's moral strength is disintegrating. Caroline agrees, saying, "There is an urgent need to recreate a vision, which will preserve all that is best in our spiritual heritage."

With the rise of Islamic extremism, Caroline sees not only Christians but moderate Muslims under attack. In Indonesia, Muslim leaders who signed peace agreements with Christians have had their homes bombed. Saying "we must offer a real hand of friendship to the moderate Muslims who wish to promote reconciliation and reconstruction,” Caroline helps to found the International Islamic Christian Organization for Reconciliation and Reconstruction (IICORR) with former Indonesian President Wahid as its honorary president.

Caroline mobilizes resources to help reconciliation and reconstruction, pointing out that "the two have to go hand in hand. You can’t have reconstruction before reconciliation because everything that has been invested may be destroyed again. But reconciliation without reconstruction could be empty words to people who have lost homes, schools, jobs, so you need to bring hope back to shattered communities.”

It is doubtful that anyone except possibly Margaret Thatcher expected Caroline to work as hard as she has. Baroness Cox has served as founder Chancellor of Bournemouth University; trustee of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the Siberian Medical University, and MERLIN (Medical Emergency Relief International); Chief Executive of HART (Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust); Council member of the Freedom Association; deputy speaker of the House of Lords; and president of Christian Solidarity, United Kingdom to name a few.

Along the way Caroline has received the Wilberforce Award, which recognizes “an individual who has made a difference in the face of formidable societal problems and injustices”. She has received honorary doctorates from universities in the UK, America, the Russian Federation, and Armenia.

These honours and recognitions are almost beside the point. Now a grandmother, Caroline says simply, “I always come back having received more than I have ever been able to give.”

Biographical details on Baroness Cox provided by, among others:

Christianity Today »

Crisis Magazine, "The Unconventional Baroness", Benedict Rogers »

Freedom Association »

FrontPage Magazine »

Wikipedia, including links to critics »

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