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HTLS 2017 speaker Bianca Jagger: A voice for the most vulnerable
Anti-war campaigner Bianca Jagger had once thought she was going to die when a Serbian soldier pointed his assault rifle at her and ordered her out of an armoured vehicle.
The turning point for committed anti-war campaigner Bianca Jagger came in 1981, when she and other members of a US Congressional delegation to Honduras took on a death squad that was abducting some 40 refugees and taking them to El Salvador. She and the others ran after the gunmen, shouting: “If you kill those refugees, you have to kill us all.” The ruse worked. The refugees were saved.
The Nicaragua-born former actress, who appeared in the hit TV show Miami Vice, said that incident transformed her life. It made her devote all her energy to fight for human rights.
While working in places such as Kosovo, where she went in 1998 with a BBC crew to document war crimes, she had another close call. She thought she was going to die when a Serbian soldier pointed his assault rifle at her and ordered her out of an armoured vehicle.But such incidents only hardened her resolve to fight for civil liberties, and to oppose war.
This world is far removed from the one she inhabited in the 1970s, when she was married to Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger and was friends with pop artist Andy Warhol. She is now the founder and chief executive of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, which she established in 2005 to be a force for change.
