A charity born in the cab of a broken lorry
By Ruth Gledhill
The Times/UK
11 Ooct 04
WATCHING yet more television news footage of starving children in
some God-forsaken country, it is easy to wonder whether the world
needs another overseas aid charity.
But there are issues that pictures alone cannot convey, and one of
the best people to explain them is Baroness Cox, a tireless human
rights campaigner who has travelled 27 times to Sudan alone, defying
numerous death threats in the process.
Her new charity, the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust, or Hart, will
concentrate on regions bypassed by the large aid providers and the
media. These would include parts of Sudan, East Timor, Burma and
Nagorno-Karabakh.
The idea for Hart came to Cox in a 32-tonne truck on a bitter winter
night in a forest in northern Poland.
The country had just been placed under martial law, and Baroness Cox
had agreed to be patron of an aid organisation, on condition that
she could travel with the aid to be certain it reached its intended
destination. Her truck broke down, and the driver went for help,
leaving her in the cab in freezing darkness. Suddenly that the words
came to her: “Share the darkness.” Since then the “Battling Baroness”,
as she is described in Andrew Boyd’s biography, has risked her life
by travelling to danger spots.
Her work in “trying to bring light to people in dark days” included
helping to set up the first professional foster-care programme for
some of the 750,000 abandoned children in Russia and a rehabilitation
centre in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The new charity, whose international director is Jayne Ozanne, a
member of the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England, is also
committed to advocacy, alongside aid, accountability as well as the
gathering of first-hand evidence of oppression. Although Lady Cox is
a Christian, the charity does not have an overtly Christian agenda.
“Those of us originally involved in it are motivated by the Christian
mandate which is to speak for the oppressed, to try to heal the sick,
feed the hungry, clothe the naked. But the Bible does not say feed
just the Christian hungry.”
Of all the suffering places she has seen, the worst has been Sudan,
where, even before Darfur, she had “walked through miles of human
corpses, cattle corpses, burnt homes.” At the end of one visit, she
says, “I just sat under a tree and wept. It was the sheer enormity
of the carnage. It has been going on in Sudan since the coup in 1989.”
The intractable vastness of such disasters is daunting. Baroness Cox
advocates raising awareness, getting communities involved, mobilising
other and local aid organisations. “In Darfur, the media got in and
the world woke up, but this was two million too late as far as the
people of southern Sudan are concerned.”
But other tragedies in far-flung places never achieve
recognition. “There are two possible answers. One is that the Western
media will all go to one place together, such as Somalia or Bosnia. It
means oppressive regimes elsewhere can get away with murder with
impunity behind closed borders because no one is reporting what
is happening.”
Another reason that some abuses never get the attention they deserve
is that other governments can be anxious to protect their interests
in those countries. She is herself considered an enemy of some of
the countries where she has worked. A prison sentence awaits her in
Khartoum, Sudan, and there is a price on her head in Azerbaijan.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress