An Interview With the Baroness Caroline Cox of Queensbury, England

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From Soviet-controlled Poland to the Darfur region of the Sudan, Baroness Caroline Cox has gone where representatives from most international agencies cannot. The Baroness’s determination to raise international awareness of genocide has angered many of the governments whose actions she has condemned. Some of these governments have banned her from crossing their borders and even issued warrants for her arrest. In the Sudan, the National Islamic Front issued a warrant for Cox’s arrest should she return to the country, and in Indonesia she was fired upon by jihad warriors. Nevertheless, Baroness Cox maintains her contacts within those countries and continues to bring aid even in the face of these threats.

Last fall, Baroness Cox visited Dartmouth and spoke before a gathering of more than seventy students about her work in violence-stricken regions as well as about her new foundation, the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART). In 2003, Cox founded HART with the dual goal of being a “voice for the voiceless” and providing aid to suffering communities that go unnoticed by other relief organizations and the international media. Cooperating with local organizations, HART also supports health and education projects that aim to be sustainable in the long term. Currently, HART supports communities in Armenia, Burma, East Timor, Russia, Sudan, Nigeria, and Uganda.

The Baroness Cox has graciously granted this publication an interview in which she discusses her faith in a benevolent God and the reality of human suffering.

The Dartmouth Apologia: How did you become so deeply involved and committed to humanitarian work?

Baroness Caroline Cox: Well, I can claim no credit for intentionality; I never had a moment when I thought, “This is what I’m going to do.” It started in the 1980s, when I just received this strange title of Baroness. This was in the dark days of martial law in Poland, which was about to plunge into an even deeper abyss of communism with martial law imposed. They asked if I would be a patron. I said I would be delighted to but only on the understanding that I could travel on the truck, as appropriate. For two reasons: one is to make sure that the aid gets to where it is destined; the other is for the advocacy side, to be able to say that I’ve been there and I’ve seen how it really is.

While I was there I encountered people of enormous dignity: deeply civilized, cultured people who were in appalling conditions of having nothing, and yet were still so generous. You never knew who sacrificed for the food on the table in front of you.

What a privilege it is to be able to help people in dark places in dark times. I’m always amazed at how much a little help can do for people who will use it with initiative, and that they will also thank you for caring enough to come. Knowing they’re not forgotten makes so much difference.

DA: How has your work with the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust challenged your faith and view of God?

BC: It’s been challenged, big time. I’ll just give perhaps one example of when it was particularly challenged in a visit to Sudan. Walking through the communities, corpses of women and children were eaten by vultures. Seeing such carnage and such desolation, when I arrived back at the airstrip, I just sat down under a tree and wept.

How could it turn out that God was a God of love who allowed these things to happen? Well, it occurred to me that I think one reason perhaps why we, in our day and time where we live, find these questions so challenging is because our Christianity has gotten very comfortable. And maybe this is epitomized by the way we keep Christmas.

There is nothing wrong with celebrating Christmas. It’s all very cozy and cheerful, and rightly so. But we forget the dark side of Christmas. We forget that when Mary was rejoicing at the birth of Jesus, hundreds of mothers were weeping at the death of their children slaughtered by Herod. We keep that fact out of the equation.

So thinking of that—thinking of Mary rejoicing over Jesus’s birth and of all the mothers weeping over the slaughtering of their baby boys—thinking of that, track forward to Christ’s death at Calvary. All that Mary could do as He died was to be there with him, at the foot of the cross, and stand in anguish. But she was there with Him in love. Maybe part of the Christian’s calling should be to be prepared to attend whatever Calvary our Lord may call us to attend: to be there for the helpless even while we are impotent to help; to be there in love and grief and profound respect.

I think it doesn’t do away with the mystery of suffering and it doesn’t do away with the mystery of the need for the cross in any way. But at least it grounds it in the theological reality and the reality of history. It puts the fact that evil is a reality right back into the center of theology.

DA: How do you reconcile the deaths of these women and children with a benevolent God? Could you elaborate on what you earlier called the “reality of evil”?

BC: It comes down to the inherent nature of love. Love does not constrain. Love gives freedom out of respect for that which it loves. Freedom includes the freedom to choose the good or the bad, the just or the unjust, good or evil. Freedom allows the evil. Love allows the evil. Otherwise it is constraining freedom, and freedom is the heart of expressing love. Therefore, evil is a reality.

The tragedy, and to some extent it is a mystery, is that the innocent suffer. It isn’t a mystery when you look at the reality of evil; evil will often inflict the innocent. The problem is that our theology has gotten too comfortable. We haven’t adequately embraced in our contemporary theology the response to evil, and therefore people see our theology as something fake.

DA: In your experience, does the affluence of a society affect the way its people reckon suffering with a benevolent God?

BC: Yes, there is no question. This is one of the things that always humbles and encourages me, and perhaps stops me from getting too morbid. In their gardens of Gethsemane, and suffering in their Calvary, they find God very real. We’re the ones with the crisis of confidence. They find joy out there. I’ll give one example, of an Anglican bishop in Nigeria.

Recently, militants from Jihad came to kill him, but he was abroad at the time. He has a lovely wife called Gloria. When the village was attacked by Jihad, she immediately got a big old vase and filled it with cooking pots and clothes and things like that. She went right down there in the middle of the action just to be there and help. My nickname for her is “Gloria in Excelsis.”

When the militants attacked, they beat up the Bishop’s sons, and then they took my good friend Gloria and they gang-raped her, violated her with broken glass and splintered wood, and stamped on her so hard she lost her eyesight. Then they stripped her and forced her to walk, mutilated, naked through the town.

After hearing this, the Bishop sent an e-mail to us. He was obviously shaken. In the e-mail was a request to have us put pressure on the Nigerian authorities to protect his community. Not his family, but his community.

Twenty-four hours later I got quite a different e-mail from the Bishop. He said he had a really good laugh. When he was a little boy his mother used to pray very hard that he would be a Christian. Now, when the churches in Nigeria get into trouble, the churches in the West pray for them. He wished that was true more. It is good for the churches in the West to pray for them. He joked that maybe they should get into trouble more often.

The Bishop had been to the hospital and sat with Gloria. She was out of intensive care and able to receive communion, and they had a good talk. They praised God that they had been found worthy to suffer for His kingdom. They prayed that God would be able to use the pain, humiliation, and anguish that Gloria had been through for His kingdom and glory.

That is how they deal. They praise God for it. It doesn’t mean that the innocent don’t suffer, but their faith is strengthened by it, their faith holds up. So my answer back to people in Britain about faith is, why is ours so wimpish?

DA: Through the course of your work, what role have you seen faith take in the rehabilitation process for traumatized people?

BC: It truly has a huge role. We have a God of healing, and while some truly will remain permanently scarred, they do find a hint of real hope and light and purpose.

For example, when I was in Uganda last week, I was walking in the town of Kitgum. There were two guys sitting by the road and they actually walked out and came to greet me. They walked with me and told stories of what they had been through, which was quite a lot.

After a long time I asked about the Lord’s Resistance Army. They still didn’t immediately say what they had been through, but then one of them did say, “Actually, I was abducted by the LRA,” and told of the horrific things that had happened, and then so did the other one.

The second guy said, “I’ve actually written my life story; would you like to have a copy?” I said, “Sure, it would be such an honor to have it.” We extended it into the next night and got back to the camp. The guy told us he had gotten up at six to rewrite it.

Talk about the nth degree of evil. They were brutalized, beaten, had to kill each other, and trample another kid to death. If they saw another child try to escape, he was brought back, laid on the ground, and chopped to pieces. The awful twist in it for him was that after he escaped, the LRA killed his father as a retaliation. He is carrying with him the responsibility for his father’s death.

At the end of his life story, I was expecting maybe a plea to help with school fees or something like that. I’m not being critical in any way—I could understand it, because they all want schooling to give themselves hope for the future. But I got to the last page, and he didn’t want money for schooling. He gave us a gift. He gave us six or seven pages of Bible text.

I actually said to him, “That’s really precious; I’m going to really treasure that you’re giving away your Bible.” He said no, he had to borrow his friend’s Bible when he wanted to read it. He knew his Bible better than I knew mine, and he didn’t even have his own Bible.

He’s obviously been deeply traumatized by bearing the responsibility of his father’s death. He can’t look you in the eyes when he’s talking about that; he’s looking right down. But when talking about the Bible, he comes alive, and his face is full of hope. I am sure there is a spiritual healing, which, at least, our Christian faith can give to many of these kids who have suffered so indescribably.

We have a God of healing, but the traumatized still need our prayer; they are so vulnerable. They ask for our prayer because sometimes they are too traumatized to pray for themselves.

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