Subject: U.S. activist dies in Iraq bombing Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 11:30:41 -0500 Message-ID: <B14120EE5C432443B21102F7925DAD020142088F@COKE.uwec.edu> From: "Grossman, Zoltan C." <GROSSMZC@uwec.edu>
An American Aid Worker Is Killed in Her Line of Duty
By Robert F. Worth
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New York Times: April 18, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 17 - For more than two years, Marla Ruzicka worked
to get help for innocent civilians caught in cross-fires here. A
28-year-old Californian with blond hair and an electric smile, she ran a
one-woman aid group.
On Saturday afternoon, Ms. Ruzicka became a casualty herself. A suicide
bomber attacked a convoy of security contractors that was passing near
her car on the airport road in Baghdad, killing her and her Iraqi
driver, United States Embassy officials in Baghdad said.
Ms. Ruzicka had worked in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. She took great
risks, often traveling to talk to Iraqis without the guards and armored
cars that reporters here tend to rely on. She also had an extraordinary
gift for promoting her cause, whether in Iraq or Washington.
She worked with Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, to get
$2.5 million for civilian victims in Afghanistan, and later, $10 million
for victims in Iraq. Last week another $10 million was authorized for
the Iraq program.
"She was the one that persuaded us," Mr. Leahy said Sunday afternoon in
a telephone interview. "Here's someone who at 28 years old did more than
most people do in a lifetime."
Ms. Ruzicka was deceptively girlish in person. She often arranged
parties for the foreign correspondents here and in Afghanistan. She was
in her element, with her distinctive giggle always audible over the
music. But she used the occasions to lobby reporters to write about the
things that mattered to her.
The evening before she died, she visited this reporter in Baghdad to
talk about civilian casualties. She spoke with affection about a
2-year-old girl she was helping, whose parents and other relatives were
killed by a missile in 2003.
"She calls me bride Marla because of my hair," she said happily of the
girl, Harah.
Ms. Ruzicka had also obtained new numbers on civilian casualties from
the American military, which does not normally release them, and was
eager to talk.
"Together we could really make a difference," she had written earlier in
a typical e-mail message. "You could go home feeling extra good."
Born in Lakeport, Calif., Ms. Ruzicka came to activism early. At the age
of 15, she walked into the offices of Global Exchange, a leftist
advocacy group in San Francisco, and collected all its brochures. Later,
she persuaded an organizer at the group to give a talk at her high
school.
In her early 20's she was an angry activist, and was once was hauled off
by police after protesting during a speech by George W. Bush, then
governor of Texas.
Later, she changed her tactics. In 2002, she attended a Senate hearing
where Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld testified about Iraq.
Afterward, she walked up and shook his hand.
"I didn't scream," she said recently. "I thanked him for testifying. And
I started talking about civilian casualties," she said, laughing.
By then she had already spent time in Afghanistan, where she stunned and
ultimately impressed many aid workers and journalists with her ability
to get help for victims. She came to Iraq in 2003 and founded her
organization, Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict.
In the past year she moved to New York, but she still spent much of her
time in Iraq. She was planning to go home in about a week.
On the day she was killed, Ms. Ruzicka was visiting Iraqi families that
had lost relatives to the violence here. She sent a text message to a
friend saying the stories had been painful to hear.
An American Army officer who arrived on the scene shortly after the
bomber struck said that Ms. Ruzicka's car was engulfed in flames, and
that she was still alive and conscious, with burns over 90 percent of
her body.
A medic on the scene treated her, said the officer, Brig. Gen. Karl
Horst, and heard her last words.
"I'm alive," she said.
Iraq Car Bomb Kills American Activist
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
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New York Times: April 18, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Marla Ruzicka died Saturday in a car bombing in
Iraq, where she had been on and off since the March 2003 invasion began,
conducting door-to-door surveys to determine the number of civilian
casualties, friends and family said.
Ruzicka dedicated her life to helping others.
At 28, she had traveled to Africa to work on AIDS issues, to Cuba to
protest the U.S. embargo and to Afghanistan after the U.S.-led war
there. The blond-haired activist with a cherubic face and infectious
smile was a one-woman campaign against human suffering who was
instrumental in securing millions of dollars in aid for distribution in
Iraq.
''It's a terrible tragedy and a tragic irony that somebody who devoted
her life to helping the victims of war would herself become a victim of
war,'' said Medea Benjamin, director of the San Francisco-based human
rights group Global Exchange, where Ruzicka got her start a decade ago
in the world of non-governmental organizations.
Ruzicka, of Lakeport, Calif., founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims
in Conflict, or CIVIC, to help families of civilians killed and injured
in Iraq. Her parents were notified of her death on Saturday, just hours
after the blast in Baghdad. U.S. Embassy officials publicly released
Ruzicka's name Sunday.
''We've been very worried about her, but we know better than to tell our
children not to do anything. We were supportive and just reminded her to
be careful,'' said her mother, Nancy Ruzicka.
She said her daughter had left her a telephone message the night before
her death, saying, ''Mom and dad, I love you. I'm OK.''
''She cared about people and gave people her love and help,'' she said.
''I'll remember the love she spread around the world and the good
ambassador that she was for her country.''
Ruzicka helped acquire millions of dollars from the federal government
for distribution in Iraq.
''She came to us with the idea of putting a special fund in the foreign
aid bill to take care of projects to help people whose businesses had
been bombed by the U.S by mistake or collateral damage of some sort,''
Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said Sunday.
''Just from the force of her personality, we decided to take a chance on
it,'' said Leahy, who planned to speak about Ruzicka on the Senate floor
Monday and possibly help organize a memorial service for her in
Washington.
''She was constantly calling us to say they're moving too slowly,'' he
said. ''She was kind of a one-person department over there ... moving
the money around.''
Benjamin recalled that Ruzicka walked into the Global Exchange office 10
years ago as a ''pretty, peppy, vivacious young woman who wanted to
learn about the world.''
''She had this real thirst to learn and always had a tremendous sense of
compassion,'' Benjamin said. ''She was quite remarkable in her ability
to absorb different issues, quickly learn about other cultures and
become an ally to people all over the world.''
Ruzicka was set to leave Iraq within a week, according to the New
York-based group Human Rights Watch.
''Everyone who met Marla was struck by her incredible effervescence and
commitment,'' Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director, said in a
statement. ''She was courageous and relentless in pursuit of accurate
information about civilians caught up in war.''
In an essay Ruzicka sent to Human Rights Watch a few days before her
death, she explained the significance of her work assessing casualties.
''A number is important not only to quantify the cost of the war, but to
me each number is also a story of someone whose hopes, dreams and
potential will never be realized, and who left behind a family,''
Ruzicka wrote.
When President Bush announced in March 2003 that the invasion of Iraq
had begun, Ruzicka was already in Baghdad with Code Pink, said Jodi
Evans, the co-founder of the women's anti-war group.
''Bush came on television saying the game is over, we're invading
Iraq,'' Evans recalled. Other activists decided to return to the United
States to talk about how the Iraqi people were affected by the invasion,
but Ruzicka made a commitment to stay. She founded the group CIVIC that
year.
''Marla thought she would be more effective staying, because once the
bombs started falling, people would be hurt and she needed to help them
get their lives back together,'' Evans said.
Even as fighting continued to rage in sections of Baghdad in mid-April
2003, Ruzicka arrived back in the Iraqi capital, set up office in an
unprotected hotel and soon was a regular visitor to the city's makeshift
newsrooms, encouraging media interest in the civilian-casualty story.
Ruzicka is among several foreign aid workers killed in Iraq. Others
included Margaret Hassan, a British aid worker who was abducted in
Baghdad in October and later shown on video pleading for her life, and
four workers for a Southern Baptist missionary group who were trying to
find a way to provide clean water to people in the northern city of
Mosul.
A funeral service was scheduled for Saturday in Lakeport.
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Associated Press Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley contributed to
this story from New York.
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On the Net:
Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict:
http://www.civicworldwide.org/
Global Exchange: http://www.globalexchange.org/
