FROM ANDREA BUFFA OF GLOBAL EXCHANGE:

Dear friends,

If you haven't already heard the terrible news, I'm writing to let you
know that Marla Ruzicka was killed today in Iraq. Marla was a Bay Area
activist for many years, and I'm sure many of you knew her.

Below is something that Medea Benjamin and Kevin Danaher of Global
Exchange wrote about Marla early this morning. Marla was a bright light
in what sometimes seems like a dark world, and I know we’ll all try our
best to make something positive come from this tragedy.

Much love and with wishes for a better world,
Andrea Buffa
Global Exchange

*************************************************************
Remembering a friend killed in Iraq, Marla Ruzicka
>From Kevin Danaher and Medea Benjamin

Just about every day we hear of bombs going off in Iraq, and perhaps we
pause for a moment and think what a tragedy it is, and then we go back
to our daily routine. But when someone close to you is killed by one of
those bombs, the world stops spinning.

On Saturday April 16, our colleague and friend, 28-year-old Marla
Ruzicka of Lakeport, California, was killed when a car bomb exploded on
the streets of Baghdad. We still don’t know the exact details of her
death, which makes it all that much harder to deal with the utter shock
of losing this bright, shining light whose work focused on trying to
bring some compassion into the middle of a war zone.

Marla was working for a humanitarian organization she founded called
CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), which documents cases
of innocent civilians hurt by war. Marla and numerous other volunteers
would go door-to-door interviewing families who had lost loved ones or
had their property destroyed by the fighting. She would then take this
information back to Washington and lobby for reparations for these families.

A case in point, taken from Marla’s own journal, as published November
6, 2003 on AlterNet:

“On the 24th of October, former teacher Mohammad Kadhum Mansoor, 59, and
his wife, Hamdia Radhi Kadhum, 45, were traveling with their three
daughters -- Beraa, 21, Fatima, 8, and Ayat, 5 years old -- when they
were tragically run over by an American tank.

“A grenade was thrown at the tank, causing it to loose control and veer
onto the highway, over the family’s small Volkswagen. Mohammad and
Hamdia were killed instantly, orphaning the three girls in the backseat.
The girls survived, but with broken and fractured bodies. We are not
sure of Ayat’s fate; her backbone is broken.

“CIVIC staff member Faiz Al Salaam monitors the girls’ condition each
day. Nobody in the military or the U.S. Army has visited them, nor has
anyone offered to help this very poor family.”

Marla first came to the Global Exchange office when she was still in
high school in Lakeport. She had heard a talk by one of staff members
about Global Exchange’s work building people-to-people ties around the
world—and she wanted to do something to help. She was a quick study and
took to the work with a passion and energy that were inspiring to us
older activists. She later chose a college (Friends World College) that
allowed her to travel to many countries and learn from diverse cultures.
She quickly develop “big love”—love of the human race, in all its joy,
frailties and exotic permutations.

Marla worked with AIDS victims in Zimbabwe, refugees in Palestine,
campesinos in Nicaragua. Following the US invasion of Afghanistan, Marla
traveled to Afghanistan with a Global Exchange delegation and she was so
moved by the plight of the civilian victims that she dedicated the rest
of her too short life to helping innocent victims of war. She was on a
similar mission in Iraq when she met with her untimely death.

Marla was once asked by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter if she would
ever consider doing work that was safer. Marla answered: “To have a job
where you can make things better for people? That’s a blessing. Why
would I do anything else?”

We are somewhat consoled by the fact that Marla died doing what she
really wanted to do: help people less fortunate than herself. Many of us
believe that character trait to be the most beautiful quality a human
being can possess. And Marla had an abundance of it.

It is so difficult to think of this lively young woman as not being
alive any more. Marla seemed to have one speed: all-ahead-full. She had
more courage than most people we know. She loved big challenges and she
took them on with a radiant smile that could melt the coldest heart.

One of the things we can do to honor Marla Ruzicka is to carry on her
heartfelt work to build a world without hunger, war and needless
suffering. And every time we start to get depressed about the state of
the world, we should take inspiration from Marla’s boundless energy and
throw ourselves back into the work of global justice with the same kind
of passion that was Marla’s most endearing quality.

=====================
Aid Worker's Words, Just a Week Before She Was Killed
by Marla Ruzicka

The writer, a 28-year-old humanitarian aid worker from California, was killed Saturday in Baghdad when a suicide bomber aiming for a convoy of contractors pulled alongside her vehicle and detonated his explosives. Her driver also died. She filed this piece from Baghdad a week before her death. The facts cited in it have been reported elsewhere as a matter of public record. However, estimates of the number of civilian deaths in Iraq vary widely. Media reports put the number between 17,000 and 20,000 people.
In my two years in Iraq, the one question I am asked the most is: "How many Iraqi civilians have been killed by American forces?" The American public has a right to know how many Iraqis have lost their lives since the start of the war and as hostilities continue.

In a news conference at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in March 2002, Gen. Tommy Franks said, "We don't do body counts." His words outraged the Arab world and damaged the U.S. claim that its forces go to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties.

During the Iraq war, as U.S. troops pushed toward Baghdad, counting civilian casualties was not a priority for the military. However, since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared major combat operations over and the U.S. military moved into a phase referred to as "stability operations," most units began to keep track of Iraqi civilians killed at checkpoints or during foot patrols by U.S. soldiers.

Here in Baghdad, a brigadier general commander explained to me that it is standard operating procedure for U.S. troops to file a spot report when they shoot a non-combatant. It is in the military's interest to release these statistics.

Recently, I obtained statistics on civilian casualties from a high-ranking U.S. military official. The numbers were for Baghdad only, for a short period, during a relatively quiet time. Other hot spots, such as the Ramadi and Mosul areas, could prove worse. The statistics showed that 29 civilians were killed by small-arms fire during firefights between U.S. troops and insurgents between Feb. 28 and April 5 — four times the number of Iraqi police killed in the same period. It is not clear whether the bullets that killed these civilians were fired by U.S. troops or insurgents.

A good place to search for Iraqi civilian death counts is the Iraqi Assistance Center in Baghdad and the General Information Centers set up by the U.S. military across Iraq. Iraqis who have been harmed by Americans have the right to file claims for compensation at these locations, and some claims have been paid. But others have been denied, even when the U.S. forces were in the wrong.

The Marines have also been paying compensation in Fallujah and Najaf. These data serve as a good barometer of the civilian costs of battle in both cities.

These statistics demonstrate that the U.S. military can and does track civilian casualties. Troops on the ground keep these records because they recognize they have a responsibility to review each action taken and that it is in their interest to minimize mistakes, especially since winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis is a key component of their strategy. The military should also want to release this information for the purposes of comparison with reports such as the Lancet study published late last year. It suggested that since the U.S.-led invasion there had been 100,000 deaths in Iraq.

A further step should be taken. In my dealings with U.S. military officials here, they have shown regret and remorse for the deaths and injuries of civilians. Systematically recording and publicly releasing civilian casualty numbers would assist in helping the victims who survive to piece their lives back together.

A number is important not only to quantify the cost of war, but as a reminder of those whose dreams will never be realized in a free and democratic Iraq.

Marla Ruzicka was founder of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. In 2003, she organized surveyors across Iraq to document civilian casualties. Before that, she managed a similar project in Afghanistan that helped to secure assistance from the U.S. government for civilian victims.
=====================
One (Especially) Sad Death in Iraq
by David Corn

Marla Ruzicka deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Unlike Paul Wolfowitz or George Tenet, she shouldn't get it for botching the job in Iraq. No, she ought to receive it for trying damn hard to make America live up to its ideals in Iraq and elsewhere. But the medal would have to be awarded posthumously--because on Saturday, Marla, an irrepressible 28-year-old from California, was killed by a bomb when a suicide bomber, who was apparently trying to strike a US convoy on the highway to Baghdad International Airport, pulled up alongside her car pulled and detonated the explosives. Faiz Ali Salaam, her 43-year-old associate and the father of a two-month-old daughter, was also killed.

I met Marla several years ago. During the early months of the (still unfinished) war in Afghanistan, I became obsessed with the idea of providing compensation for the civilians killed or injured in Afghanistan as the result of the US military action. Few others--in the media, on Capitol Hill, in the foreign policy community--shared my concern, which rose from both a humanitarian sentiment and a sense of national self-interest. If the United States was killing and maiming civilians in Afghanistan to protect ourselves--even if inadvertently--it seemed to me Washington should do whatever it could not to piss off further the people in Afghanistan (and other countries) by ignoring the plight of the noncombatants. Soon after writing about this, I was contacted by Marla. She had been in Kabul, where she had conducted surveys to assess the extent of civilian casualties, and she was now in Washington pressing for US assistance to the families harmed. She had been doing the hard--and dangerous--on-the-ground work.

I was much impressed by her, as were others in Washington. She was a passionate, facts-driven advocate who cared about the individual lives of victims so often kept out of our collective conscience by being described as "collateral damage." No, she urged, they count, too. As much as our fallen neighbors struck down on September 11. And she meant that quite literally. She argued that these people ought to be counted; their deaths should be recorded by someone, especially since the Bush administration showed a particular disinterest in mounting such calculations or even acknowledging the damage done to civilians. Marla wanted to chronicle the truth and aid the afflicted. She was brave. She was concerned. She was a hero.

During one of our conversations after the major fighting was done in Afghanistan, we discussed her future. She was not finished with her Afghanistan work, but she sensed there was a bigger issue afoot: the general attitude toward civilian victims of war. She was right. We both saw that a war in Iraq was on its way. There will be antiwar activists raising hell, I told her, and Marla easily could be one of their leaders. But she had identified and filled a crucial need overlooked by so many others in the antiwar movement. She had made herself indispensable to the cause of social justice, and she had, in a way, transcended the typical ideological and policy disputes. I encouraged her to continue and expand her efforts.

Marla did engage in organizing against the war in Iraq, but once Bush launched the invasion, she created a small, nonprofit outfit called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC). Shortly after the invasion, she quickly organized a team of 160 Iraqis to conduct a survey. These researchers interviewed thousands and documented nearly 2,000 civilian deaths from the start of the invasion to May 1, 2003--the day Bush prematurely declared the end of major military operations in Iraq. "The purpose of the survey is not to quantify the total humanitarian impact of the war in Iraq, but rather to identify victims and families of those in need of recognition and assistance," CIVIC later noted. "... Each death, injury and house that was destroyed represents a story and a need." After her death, Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, told the Associated Press that it had been Ruzicka's idea to create a special fund in last year's multibillion-dollar foreign aid bill to help Iraqis whose businesses had been damaged by US bombs.

The innocent casualties of war were too real for Marla. In November 2003, she sent an email to Alternet in which she described one small tragedy in Iraq:

Friends:

As terrorists wreak havoc on life in Baghdad, innocent families are getting caught in the crossfire.

On the 24th of October, former teacher Mohammad Kadhum Mansoor, 59, and his wife, Hamdia Radhi Kadhum, 45, were traveling with their three daughters -- Beraa, 21, Fatima, 8, and Ayat, 5 years old -- when they were tragically run over by an American tank.

A small grenade was thrown at the tank, causing it to loose control and veer onto the highway, over the family's small Volkswagen. Mohammad and Hamdia were killed instantly, orphaning the three girls in the backseat. The girls survived, but with broken and fractured bodies. We are not sure of Ayat's fate; her backbone is broken.

CIVIC staff member Faiz Al Salaam monitors the girls' condition each day. Nobody in the military or the U.S. Army has visited them, nor has anyone offered to help this very poor family.

The only assistance from U.S. forces in Iraq is via the neighborhood Central Military Operations Center (CMOC). If the girls can get to their offices, their case will be filed and heard via a town council. This offers little hope for these girls, who are faced with immediate needs and a broken future.

The U.S. needs to have a clear procedure to respond to cases like Ayat's. CIVIC is working to try to establish such a system of assistance, but for now, the very least we can do to show our sympathy is to help Ayat and her sisters ourselves.

Thank you, and let's hope and pray for a peaceful Iraq.

--Marla

The task that Marla had assumed for herself was to make America better--even when she disagreed with the government. She opposed the war in Iraq. But once the United States began killing people in Iraq, she wanted this mission conducted with true concern for those errantly harmed. In December 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle published an accurate profile of her. It noted:

Marla Ruzicka's life is driven by numbers. The numbers of Iraqi civilians dead, the numbers of the wounded. How many of their homes have been destroyed?

As founder of CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), Ruzicka works 15-hour days in the thick of the war zone, going door to door to assess the harm done to innocent Iraqis caught in the line of fire. Ruzicka then uses that information to lobby the U.S. government for assistance....

While the Defense Department keeps official records of U.S. troops killed and wounded (440 and 2,470 as of Dec. 1), no one has stepped forward to do the same for Iraqi civilians but Ruzicka, the self-appointed watchdog of civilians harmed in recent Middle East conflicts....

An unofficial survey she undertook in Afghanistan confirmed 824 dead. Returning to the United States, she lobbied Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to insert language in an appropriations bill that would provide $3.75 million to help victims. In July, the money started trickling in to the devastated country....

"Marla is an exceptionally determined, energetic and brave young woman who has traveled to the front lines to focus attention on an issue that too often gets ignored," he said. "Civilians bear the brunt of the suffering in wars today, but there is no policy to help them. Marla and her organization have helped put a human face on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by identifying the victims and their needs, and by lobbying for assistance."

...Would she ever consider doing something a little ... safer?

"To have a job where you can make things better for people? That's a blessing," she said. "Why would I do anything else?"

Author Peter Bergen, a friend of hers, noted yesterday,

One really interesting thing is that Marla was very opposed to the Iraq war before it began, but once the war started I never heard her express any opinion about the war itself. Once the war started she just wanted to help people who were hurt, not engage in a debate about the merits of the war. Beneath her Californian happy-go-luck demeanor Marla was a very hardheaded realist about what needed to be done. The war happened. People were hurt. She wanted to help them. And an example of her realistic approach is how she worked in Afghanistan and Iraq compensating the families who died. Marla had no patience for people who demonstrated against the war, and did nothing else.

Marla told one interviewer, "My long-term goal is to get a desk at the State Department that looks at civilian casualties." It seems like that would be a natural. Shouldn't a nation keep track of and be concerned about the damage done to civilians when it engages in military actions? Yet what a dream that was--and remains.

There will be memorials for Marla Ruzicka. Senators Patrick Leahy and Barbara Boxer have said they will offer tributes to her on the Senate floor. Last night after I heard the news of her death, I looked in on my two daughters--age four and five-and-a-half. Thinking of Marla's parents, Nancy and Clifford Ruzicka, I imagined how proud I will be if my children grow up to be women who have the sort of strength and conviction Marla possessed. And how scared I will be.

CIVIC was the brainchild of one helluva woman. But the idea, the simple idea--that we care about the innocent people killed in our name--was much larger than one person. Or it should be. Unlike the leaders of the US government, Marla knew that America--for humanitarian and security reasons--had an obligation to help noncombatants injured by US forces. Marla deserved many more years. And the people she helped and tried to help deserved more assistance from this idealistic American.

She will, of course, not be receiving the Medal of Freedom from a president who leads an administration that has said it does not bother to collect data on civilians killed or injured by its military and that has been tremendously slow to compensate the innocent Afghan and Iraqi civilians who have lost loved ones, limbs, homes and businesses due to US military actions. In fact, according to an article in The Washington Post, Marla had "stayed in Baghdad longer than she had planned because she believed she had found the key to establishing that the U.S. military kept records of its civilian victims, despite its official statements otherwise, colleagues said."

In the years I have written this column I don't think I have ever asked a reader to make a donation to an organization. But please consider contributing to CIVIC. You can do so by clicking here. It won't be just for Marla. It will be for the people she lived and died for--and for a principle that all Americans ought to consider seriously: when we fight a war, we are responsible for the triumphs and for the costs.

=======================================================

sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

San Francisco Chronicle

Bay Area tragedy in Baghdad
Marla Ruzicka, who led humanitarian aid movement in Iraq, dies in
car-bombing
- Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, April 18, 2005


A car bomb attack near Baghdad has killed a well-known activist from
Northern California who entered war zones to record civilian deaths in
Iraq and Afghanistan and secure aid for those caught in the crossfire.

Marla Ruzicka, 28, of Lakeport (Lake County), founder of CIVIC --
Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict -- died with her driver on the
Baghdad Airport road Saturday when a suicide bomber attacked a convoy of
security contractors that was passing next to her vehicle, according to
her family and news reports quoting U.S. Embassy officials in Iraq.

The target of the attack apparently was not Ruzicka's vehicle, said her
mother, who received the account from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

She was killed while traveling "to visit an Iraqi child injured by a
bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent
victims of this war," said CIVIC representative April Pedersen in a
statement on the group's Web site.

Given the U.S. military's policy of not accounting for civilian
casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, Ruzicka's work played a key role in
drawing attention to the human tragedy of the war and giving the world a
well-researched accounting of the cost in innocent lives.

Ruzicka grew up in Lakeport and made New York City her base for her
frequent trips to the war areas. She continued going into the
increasingly violent Iraqi conflict areas even after most international
aid organizations and relief agencies had bailed out.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, she worked 15-hour days going out to scenes of
civilian carnage and painstakingly documenting the toll. She also
struggled to obtain relief for the families of the victims.
Among those calling the distraught family Sunday was U.S. Sen. Patrick
Leahy D-Vt.

"I just feel terrible," Leahy told The Chronicle in a telephone
interview from his home outside Washington, D.C. "I told her father that
most people in a lifetime would never accomplish what she has. She was
only 28."

Ruzicka, in an irrepressible one-woman campaign, got Leahy's office
involved in winning Congressional approval of civilian aid worth $10
million in Afghanistan and $20 million in Iraq, said Leahy aide Tim Rieser.

"Marla was really the inspiration behind these programs," Rieser said.
"On the surface, she doesn't seem like someone whom people in Congress
would pay attention to -- vivacious, scatterbrained, losing her
cell-phone every 15 minutes, living out of a suitcase, having no money.

"Then you listen to her, and you realize she's the only one doing it.
She's out there getting the data. She was doing something that really
needed to be done but was so dangerous many people wouldn't do it."

Her death stunned the activist community in the Bay Area and beyond.

"Marla seemed to have one speed -- all-ahead-full," Kevin Danaher and
Medea Benjamin, co-founders of San Francisco's Global Exchange, said in
a memorial statement Sunday responding to what they called "the utter
shock of losing this bright, shining light whose work focused on trying
to bring some compassion into the middle of a war zone."

It was at Global Exchange, a human rights advocacy group, that Ruzicka
began her activist career while still in high school.

A dozen years ago, recalled Global Exchange board member Tony Newman, "a
15-year-old blond-haired girl walked into our office and starting
grabbing armfuls of our research -- leaflets, brochures, books. I had
never seen anyone go in so hungry for material. She said she was going
to take them back to her high school to share with others."

Newman soon found himself going to Lakeport to speak about the U.S.
embargo of Cuba, a talk organized by the energetic Ruzicka, also a
basketball star at Clear Lake High School.

She later saw suffering first-hand in the Middle East, Zimbabwe and
Nicaragua through her work with Global Exchange and as a college student
at Long Island University's Friends World program.

On a trip to Afghanistan with Global Exchange, Ruzicka "was so moved by
the plight of the civilian victims that she dedicated the rest of her
too short life to helping innocent victims of war," Danaher and Benjamin
said.

As she got older, her approach evolved from direct action to pragmatic
cooperation. Her mother recalled an early episode when President Bush
visited Sacramento during the California energy crisis.

"She mooned the President," her mother said. "The back of her underpants
said, 'Public Power Now.' When she turned back around, the President
looked her in the face -- he was only about a foot away -- and said,
'Cute.' "

Her parents are both Republican but have always supported their daughter
and her work, they said Sunday.

"We're proud of her accomplishments," said her mother, a part-time
travel agent who helped arrange discount plane tickets for her daughter.
"We're going to miss her so much. She was a loving person, and she
spread that love around the world in her concern for others."

Her father, Clifford Ruzicka, who runs a civil engineering firm in
Lakeport, is trying to help CIVIC continue the work his daughter began.

"She was doing humanitarian work," he said. "It's the plan to keep that
organization viable."

Any donations in his daughter's memory are requested to go to CIVIC at
PO Box 1189, Lakeport, CA 95453, he said.

"She was constantly meeting with families and constantly meeting with
the military," said Chris Allbritton, a freelance journalist in Iraq.
"She was incredibly high energy, incredibly big heart, and she really
cared."

Chronicle reporter Rob Collier, who has witnessed Ruzicka's work abroad,
described her as "heavily driven, fast-paced and capable of unusual
political pragmatism -- what some of her former colleagues called
opportunism.

"She was a charming and relentless schmoozer, making friends of
journalists, military officers, aid workers and government officials. It
seemed that every journalist in Baghdad knew her."

Her research was a valuable resource for journalists and also a prod.
She was profiled in a 2003 book, "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq."
In a newspaper interview last year, the book's co-author, Bill Katovsky
of Mill Valley, called her "the media's conscience."

She won key support from George Soros' "Open Society Institute," said
Michael Shellenberger, a Bay Area friend of 10 years.

"She was trying to get a precedent set where militaries pay for civilian
victims," Shellenberger said. "I think there's something historic about
that."

A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at St. Mary's Church
in Lakeport. A memorial service is being planned later in Washington, D.C.

Chronicle staff writers Matthew B. Stannard and Cecilia Vega contributed
to this report. E-mail Charles Burress at cburress (at) sfchronicle.com

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www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-womarl0418,0,2660982,print.story

U.S. aid worker killed in Iraq
Passionate advocate for victims of war, 28-year-old is slain in suicide
blast on road to Baghdad airport

BY MATTHEW McALLESTER
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

April 17, 2005, 8:47 PM EDT

ROME -- My friend Marla Ruzicka was killed by a suicide bomber in
Baghdad on Saturday. She was 28, and she risked her life helping people
for a living.

Many people have died in Iraq since the invasion, few more worthy of
your tears and mine than she was.

Marla spent the last few years doing her best to make sure that innocent
victims of American wars received due compensation. She didn't take
sides or a political stance; she preferred to help. A man pedaling a
bicycle to work shot dead in Iraq or Afghanistan, a bomb falling too
close to someone's house -- Marla would help get the families and
communities some money. Working with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), she
persuaded Congress to appropriate a total of $17.5 million to help
victims in those countries.

She grew up in Lakeport, Calif., and obtained a bachelor's in political
science and social work at Long Island University.

After going to Afghanistan at the end of that war, she founded and ran
an aid agency called Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or
CIVIC. She was never shrill, never to be denied.

"She was the only one of us who ever did anything good," a reporter
friend said to me on the phone from Baghdad on Saturday night, talking
as though Marla, an aid worker, was one of us, a correspondent. "Our
stupid stories."

She e-mailed me recently from Baghdad about the latest stage of her
mission: "I am trying to set up a way that the Americans will give me
info on casualties they cause so I can then apply for compensation. I am
going to stay here another two weeks -- hard to leave. Making little
bits of progress here with the new round of troops -- they really want
to help but have their hands tied -- so I am learning to break those
ties -- all this takes time and I am setting up things for my return in
the summer."

With her death, her family loses, and thousands of people in the margins
of the wars we wage nowadays lose.

She and CIVIC's Iraqi country director, a man named Faiz, were killed
when a suicide bomber in a car attacked an armed convoy on the most
dangerous road in the world on Saturday afternoon. It was the road to
the airport in Baghdad, and she was, apparently, on her way back from an
interview with an Iraqi family.

As the word spread to friends -- so many of them reporters -- in
Washington, Istanbul, New York, some people sobbed over the phone. We
put together words for a living, but those few words we could come up
with were banal and useless.

Marla was lovely, frail, strong, would swim every morning in our hotel
pool in Baghdad and encourage us all to do the same "for your mental
health." She yearned for nothing more than for the absurdly large number
of people she adored to adore each other. She was the ultimate hostess
and had organized another of her parties at the Hamra hotel for Saturday
night. When she failed to turn up for her own party, everyone knew
something was wrong.

It was typical that she should be working and partying on the same day.
It was through her party-throwing skills that she developed such a broad
base of support for CIVIC in the first place.

Take a look at her and her work on www.civicworldwide.org. You'll
see for yourself.

"Check out the August issue of Elle where I am featured on page 93!"
Marla wrote on the site. "Tell your friend to check it out, too, as it
builds profile for CIVIC. (I sure wish they would give me a makeover --
I need one!)"

She'll never need a makeover in the eyes of those very many she cared
for. She was great as she was.
------------
www.alternet.org/story/21779/

Counting On Marla

By Tai Moses, AlterNet. Posted April 18, 2005.

Politicians and government officials learned the hard way how relentless
this sweet-faced girl, barely out of her teens, could be.

Counting On Marla

I only knew Marla Ruzicka a few short years, but that was all it took
for her to leave an indelible impression on me.

Marla's self-assigned mission in life was to help innocent people who
are caught in the crossfire of armed conflict. So, perhaps it was
fitting, in the brutally impersonal way of the universe, that Marla
herself became an innocent victim of war. On Saturday, April 16, Marla
was killed in a car bomb attack as her vehicle traveled along the road
to the Baghdad airport. She was 28 years old.

Marla Ruzicka was a paradox. In some respects, she was the
quintessential California girl -- so pretty, blond and lively she could
be mistaken for a cheerleader. But behind that luminous smile was a
person of remarkable strength who possessed a purple heart of courage.

I first met Marla in 2001, shortly after she had returned from a trip to
Afghanistan. Since she would be in the Bay Area only a short time, Marla
had arranged a party with a two-pronged purpose: to see as many of her
friends and colleagues as possible and to raise money for the aid work
she was doing. People gathered at a restaurant in the Mission to share a
meal and purchase textiles Marla had brought back from Afghanistan.

Eventually it was time for the money pitch. Someone always has to give
the money pitch, to encourage people to open up their wallets. But I had
never heard a pitch like Marla's. She told us about the Afghan people
she had met, not as an anonymous mass of victims, but as individuals
with names and stories. She laughed at some memories; her eyes filled
with tears at others. She talked about them as if they were members of
her family, and in a sense they were. I still have the diaphanous black
shawl I got that day.

Marla's close friend, Tony Newman, tells the story of how they met -- at
the Global Exchange office in San Francisco, where he worked at the
time. He noticed a girl of about 15 or 16 grabbing up all the
newsletters and brochures she could carry. When the teenager had
collected an armload, he couldn't ignore her any longer. "I went and
asked, 'Are you being helped?' and she said, 'I'm from Lakeport, and I
want to educate everyone in my school about what's going on in the world.'"

They spoke for a while. By the time Marla left, Tony had agreed to come
to Lakeport to give a talk about his work. "I was totally impressed with
her enthusiasm," he said. "I thought Lakeport was in Marin. I didn't
know it was like four hours away."

Tony drove up to Lakeport and searched the unfamiliar town for the hall
where he was to speak. "The first person I asked for directions on the
street said, 'Are you here to give the Global Exchange talk?'" Marla,
Tony says, had informed the entire town about his talk. Her dentist, her
mailman, her basketball coach -- everyone she knew was there.

"I was so impressed and blown away that this young girl was able to turn
out 70 people in this small town," Tony said. "That's more people than
you get in San Francisco!"

People who knew Marla say she gave off a sort of glow, as if she were
lit from within. That was just her nature, but a true fire was ignited
during her first visit to Afghanistan, as she told an interviewer:

On the road from Peshawar, Pakistan, to Jalalabad, crossing the
border, I fell in love in 10 seconds. I fell in love with the light, the
way the mountains blend with the earth, the colors; the whole place just
put a spell on me. It was the sunlight; there was a magic driving down
that road. Not too far inside the country, the reality of the past
became apparent -- tanks were everywhere and I could see 23 years of
devastation. My heart broke and I made a commitment to ensure that no
more innocent Afghans had to suffer.

In the years to come, Marla would never waver from that commitment.
Working with Global Exchange, she returned to Afghanistan several more
times, and then in 2003, she founded her own organization, the Campaign
for Innocent Victims of Conflict, or CIVIC.

What she wanted was very simple: civilian victims of U.S. military
actions should be counted, she said, and compensated for their losses.
Since the military did not keep count of civilian casualties, Marla
commenced her own count. In Iraq she engaged volunteer survey teams to
go door to door and gather data about the numbers of dead or wounded in
each family. Finally, armed with information, Marla went to Washington
DC. There she convinced Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy to sponsor
legislation that would provide aid to civilians harmed in military
operations.

A funny thing about Marla was that the steely purpose that drove her was
not always immediately apparent. This worked to her advantage.
Politicians and government officials learned the hard way how relentless
this sweet-faced girl, barely out of her teens, could be. Marla
possessed a quality once known as "pluck." To many of the bureaucrats
she lobbied tirelessly on behalf of Afghan and Iraqi civilians, it
translated to "pain in the ass."

While Marla was persistent about getting what she needed, she didn't
believe in making enemies. Her guiding principle was love. She really
was one of those rare, genuinely nice people. Even those who did not
support her cause often ended up succumbing to her charm. In December
2003, Marla told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Marines had
affectionately nicknamed her "Cluster Bomb Girl" because she was always
nagging them to clear mined areas she had learned about.

I saw Marla again in 2003, at a fundraiser in Santa Monica at the home
of film producer Robert Greenwald. She was wearing short shorts and the
wrong shade of lipstick. She looked angelic and sort of goofy at the
same time. She greeted me warmly and said she was tired, achingly tired,
and I could see that underneath the bright lipstick and makeup, her face
was pale. She had returned from Baghdad and was on her way to
Washington; Marla was always on her way someplace. Still, she seemed
happy. She was doing exactly what she wanted to do. As Tony Newman put
it, "Marla always seemed to have this joyful energy, even though there
was so much sadness and death around her."

It is difficult to believe that Marla is gone. So many people counted on
her for so much, and she counted for so many people. For the Iraqis and
Afghans she advocated for, to her family, friends and colleagues, to
complete strangers who were inspired by her heroism -- yes, heroism is
the right word -- Marla Ruzicka's death is among the unrecoverable
losses of this war.

When Marla returned from that first pivotal visit to Afghanistan, a
reporter asked her if she wanted to go back. She answered without
hesitation, with her characteristic passion, "I want to go back every
second. Yes, I will go back, or my heart will stop beating."

Marla Ruzicka's family asks that those who want to make a donation, make
it out to CIVIC so they can keep Marla's work going in Iraq. Send checks
to Clifford and Nancy Ruzicka, 3324 Lakeshore Blvd., Lakeport, CA 95453.
You may also make a contribution online, on the CIVIC website.

Tai Moses is a contributing editor of AlterNet.
-----------------------------


April 18, 2005
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Young Activist's Life Cut Short in Iraq Blast
By Doug Smith, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — She hugged and laughed her way through war zones with an
effervescence belying her seriousness of purpose.

No pass to get through a checkpoint? She leaned across her Iraqi driver
to show the stern American guard the shock of blond hair beneath her
flowing black robes.

"Please, please, please, please, please," she said, and then, "Where are
you from?"

She waved aside tough-looking guards from all corners of the world,
never looking back to see if they had raised an AK-47 in her direction.
In her one-woman mission to make the United States take responsibility
for the innocent victims of its wars, 28-year-old Marla Ruzicka bubbled
with a passion that seemed to lift her beyond danger.

Iraq's random violence caught up with Ruzicka on Saturday. Her car
pulled alongside a convoy of U.S. contractors just as a suicide bomber
detonated his car. Ruzicka, her driver-translator and one guard on the
convoy were killed. Five other people were wounded.

Her death stunned a wide circle of diplomats, government officials,
soldiers, journalists and ordinary people from Baghdad to Kabul.

"God bless her pure soul, she was trying to help us," said Haj Natheer
Bashir, the brother-in-law of an Iraqi teenager Ruzicka was trying to
evacuate to the Bay Area for surgery. "She was just a kind lady."

A former Marine who now works for the State Department in Baghdad said:
"She was a remarkable woman and a kind person, and she affected everyone
she came in contact with." The diplomat said he was not authorized to
speak on the record about Ruzicka because her remains were awaiting DNA
analysis for positive identification.

Ruzicka was en route to visit an injured Iraqi girl, her group's website
said. But it wasn't clear why she was on the notoriously dangerous
Baghdad airport road, or why her car pulled up alongside a convoy.
Almost all Baghdad drivers slam on their brakes as soon as they see a
row of slow-moving SUVs ahead to avoid getting in the way of possible
car bombs.

Raised in conservative Lakeport, north of San Francisco, the 5-foot-3
Ruzicka was a high school basketball star, a leading three-point
shooter. She also showed an early attraction to humanitarian causes.
Ruzicka and her twin brother, Mark, were the youngest of six children of
Clifford and Nancy Ruzicka. Mark, who gathered with family and friends
at their parents' home in Lakeport on Sunday, said his sister had led a
school protest against the Persian Gulf War in 1991 when she was in
eighth grade, and was promptly suspended.

Her high school principal, Pat McGuire, sent an e-mail to the family
Sunday after learning of her death, recalling that Ruzicka, after
reading Alan Paton's novel "Cry, The Beloved Country" and watching a
videotape of the slaying of a young American woman in South Africa, had
come away with a desire to do humanitarian work.

During her college years at Long Island University she traveled to
countries such as Cuba, Guatemala and Costa Rica. When she visited
Israel, she also traveled to Ramallah in the West Bank.

Her father, 69, a civil engineer, said the family became accustomed to
her travels.

"She had a lot of purpose in her life, so it was kind of natural that
she would go into places like these," he said. He added that he was
proud of her as a "lady with a tremendously open heart and warm feelings
toward the people who've been in conflict and war."

About 10 years ago, she showed up at the San Francisco offices of the
left-leaning Global Exchange, said its founder, Medea Benjamin, the
Green Party's candidate for the U.S. Senate from California in 2000.
Ruzicka accompanied Benjamin to Afghanistan in 2001 after the war to
oust the Taliban, and came back a changed person, said her friend and
volunteer attorney, David Frankel.

"She could no longer relate to the boring, mundane details of ordinary
life," Frankel said.

She returned to Afghanistan on her own funds, "finding people who were
hurt, finding what they needed — an artificial limb, a skin graft, a new
roof over their house. She would find a way to fill the need directly,"
he said.

A few days after Baghdad fell in April 2003, Ruzicka showed up in Iraq.
She began building a volunteer network to document civilian casualties.
The records they compiled on more than 2,000 dead provided an early
accounting of the war's toll. The currently accepted figure, based
largely on news accounts, is between 17,000 and 20,000, said Newsweek
reporter Owen Matthews, a friend of Ruzicka, who said her compilation
stood out because of its detail.

Several friends said Ruzicka experienced steep emotional swings and had
a troubled side to her life.

"This was her therapy," Matthews said.

As she struggled to build her own organization, Campaign for Innocent
Victims in Conflict, or CIVIC, Ruzicka began shuttling between Baghdad,
an office in New York and her parents' home in the Bay Area.

She also traveled to Washington to lobby for aid for Iraqi war victims.
Tim Rieser, an aide to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), credited Ruzicka
with inspiring an appropriation of $17.5 million for aid to Afghanistan
and Iraq.

Her own fundraising effort wasn't taking off, though.

"We always thought we would raise more than we could," said Kathleen
Aguilera, a friend and former staff member.
Ruzicka had been away from Iraq since summer, and returned to Baghdad
several weeks ago. Aguilera said she thought Ruzicka was "hoping to
bring it to the heart with individual donors" by collecting stories of
individual tragedies.

Benjamin said she had cautioned Ruzicka about the danger of going back.

"I thought it would be better to wait for a while and see if the
situation got better than to put her life at risk," she said. "She was
determined to go because the people she worked with didn't have the
luxury not to be at risk."

Baghdad had changed since the early months after the war, when Western
civilians could mingle with Iraqis in many parts of the country. In the
new Baghdad, Westerners live in guarded compounds, and every excursion
is a carefully planned mission with two cars and a bodyguard.

Aid workers have not been immune from the violence. Irish-born Margaret
Hassan of Care International was killed by kidnappers in November.
Reporters seek to blend in by growing beards and wearing the casual look
popular among Iraqis. Ruzicka adopted the robe and head coverings that
Western women now use in transit. Still, ebullient and given to an
irrepressible laugh, Ruzicka hardly blended in. Aid organizations shun
publicity, but Ruzicka openly courted the media.

"I need it for my fundraising," she said.

Running her operation on a shoestring, Ruzicka was accompanied only by
Faiz Ali Salim, 43, who served as her driver and translator. An
unemployed commercial pilot, Ali Salim had become Ruzicka's right-hand
man in Iraq after the war. Now the father of an infant and once again
flying for Iraqi Air, he was doing his last tour with Ruzicka.
"He loved to work with her due to the nature of her work as a
humanitarian," said Ali Salim's brother, Najah. "We were not worried
that he was working with a foreign woman. We did not expect she would be
harmed, as she was working in a human field."

Despite the risks, Ruzicka traveled all over Baghdad. In one day, she
met a government minister, visited a hospital and the U.S. military's
Iraqi assistance center and conferred for hours with a reporter,
searching for civilians wounded by U.S. military action.

It was Matthews, the Newsweek reporter, who gave Ruzicka one of her
leads. In March, he had written about Rakan Hassan, a youth from Mosul
orphaned and partially paralyzed by fire from a helicopter gunship.
Ruzicka visited Hassan in Mosul and thought she could find a sponsor to
get him to Oakland for surgery. The family obtained passports, and
Ruzicka was working on visas. X-rays were planned. Matthews said he was
going to lend her $300.

On Saturday, she had planned a party. But she wasn't there. News of her
death came in fragments that no one could confirm.

By morning, cellphones had carried it to Kabul, Vienna, Amman,
Washington and San Francisco. Late in the day, Bashir, brother-in-law of
the wounded youth in Mosul, answered a phone and learned that the boy's
benefactor would not return.

On the day before she died, Ruzicka had called her parents. She got
their answering machine, and left a short message telling them she loved
them.

Her father recalled admonishing her in their last conversation to be
careful.

"Daddy," she said, "I will be careful."
*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writers Jia-Rui Chong in Los Angeles, Saif Rasheed and
Raheem Salman in Baghdad and special correspondent Robert Hollis in
Lakeport contributed to this article.

----------------------


COUNTING ON MARLA
Tai Moses, AlterNet
Politicians and government officials learned the hard way
how relentless this sweet-faced girl, barely out of her
teens, could be.
www.alternet.org/story/21779/

ONE OF A KIND
Don Hazen, AlterNet
To say Marla was unique may seem a cliche, but in my many
years of political work and journalism, I have never known
anyone quite like her.
www.alternet.org/story/21777/

REMEMBERING A FRIEND KILLED IN IRAQ
Medea Benjamin, Kevin Danaher, AlterNet
Marla Ruzicka was a bright, shining light whose work focused
on trying to bring some compassion into the middle of a war
zone.
www.alternet.org/story/21778/

MOURNING MARLA
Jill Carroll, Christian Science Monitor
Intrepid humanitarian aid worker Marla Ruzicka died in
Baghdad Saturday when her car was caught in an insurgent
attack.
www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21780/

YOUNG ACTIVIST'S LIFE CUT SHORT IN IRAQ BLAST
By Doug Smith, Los Angeles Times
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-marla18apr18,0,6091685.story

BAY AREA TRAGEDY IN BAGHDAD
MARLA RUZICKA, WHO LED HUMANITARIAN AID MOVEMENT IN IRAQ, DIES IN CAR-BOMING
By Charles Buress, San Francisco Chronicle
sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi

SLAIN ACTIVIST PRAISED FOR WORK IN IRAQ
Associated Press
www.cnn.com/2005/US/04/17/activist.killed.ap/index.html

HUMANITARIAN GROUP FOUNDER KILLED IN IRAQ
CNN
www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/04/17/iraq.main/index.html

----------------------------

MARLA RUZICKA, FOUNDER,
CIVIC, Campaign for Innocent Victims In Conflict,
www.civicworldwide.org/about.htm

AT DEATH'S DOOR: AMERICAN WOMAN TRAVELS DOOR TO DOOR TO COUNT IRAQI
CASUALTIES
By David Wright, ABC News
May 28th, 2004
www.veteransforpeace.org/American_woman_052803.htm

MARLA RUZICKA: 26 YEAR-OLD DOING 'THE RIGHT HUMANITARIAN THING'
By Jane Ganahl, San Francisco Chronicle
December 20th, 2003
www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1230-08.htm

LETTER FROM IRAQ
By Marla Ruzicka, AlterNet.
November 6, 2003
www.alternet.org/story/17135/

HUMAN COST OF WAR
BBC NEWS WORLD EDITION
July 8th, 2003
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/3052726.stm