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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Elections & Legislation : International Relations : Iraq : Protest Activity |
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Iraq Car Bomb Kills American Activist |
Current rating: 0 |
by AP
(No verified email address) |
17 Apr 2005
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Ruzicka got her start working for non-governmental organizations 10 years ago at the San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange.
Medea Benjamin, the group's director, said Ruzicka was a ''pretty, peppy, vivacious young woman who wanted to learn about the world.'' Ruzicka worked on projects ranging from AIDS in Africa to the travel embargo against Cuba, she said.
''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,'' Benjamin said. |
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A woman who led an effort to help those ravaged by violence in Iraq, lobbying congressmen for millions of dollars in aid that she helped deliver to families, fell victim to the war herself when a car bomb killed her and two other people, officials said Sunday.
Marla Ruzicka, founder of Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, died Saturday in the blast, which also killed an Iraqi and another foreigner, officials said. She had been in Iraq conducting door-to-door surveys trying to determine the number of civilian casualties in the country.
Ruzicka, 28, of Lakeport, founded CIVIC in 2003 and was instrumental in securing millions of dollars in aid money from the federal government for distribution in Iraq.
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said it was Ruzicka's idea to put a special fund in last year's multibillion-dollar foreign aid bill to help Iraqis whose businesses had been bombed by mistake or as collateral damage.
''She was constantly calling us to say (lawmakers were) moving too slowly,'' he said by telephone on Sunday. ''Just from the force of her personality, we decided to take a chance on it.''
Ruzicka's parents said they were notified of her death just hours after the explosion. 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 that said, ''Mom and dad, I love you. I'm OK.''
''She cared about people and gave people her love and help,'' Nancy Ruzicka said. ''I'll remember the love she spread around the world and the good ambassador that she was for her country.''
Leahy remembered Ruzicka as a fiery young woman who came into his office about two years seeking federal money to aid civilians in Iraq.
Leahy said $10 million was added to the foreign aid bill last year for that purpose and another $10 million has been set aside for next year. The money was being distributed by government aid workers with Ruzicka's help, he said.
Leahy said he would speak about Ruzicka on the Senate floor Monday, and possibly help plan a memorial service for the woman in Washington.
''I said to her father this morning, 'A lot of people spend their whole lives and do not begin to accomplish what she's done,''' Leahy said.
Ruzicka got her start working for non-governmental organizations 10 years ago at the San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange.
Medea Benjamin, the group's director, said Ruzicka was a ''pretty, peppy, vivacious young woman who wanted to learn about the world.'' Ruzicka worked on projects ranging from AIDS in Africa to the travel embargo against Cuba, she said.
''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,'' Benjamin said.
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.
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On the Net:
Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict: http://www.civicworldwide.org/
Global Exchange: http://www.globalexchange.org/
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press
http://www.ap.org/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
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Remembering a friend killed in Iraq, Marla Ruzicka |
by friends of Marla
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Apr 2005
|
On Saturday April 16, our colleague and friend, 27-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. more info: http://www.civicworldwide.org from http://www.globalexchange.org
Dear Friends of Marla and CIVIC,
It is with deep sadness and regret that I am writing to inform you that Marla died on Saturday at the age of 28 in a suicide bomb attack. Faiz, her Iraqi partner, was also killed.
It is tragically ironic that two beautiful people who devoted their lives to helping innocent victims of war have now become them.
The attack occurred on the Baghdad Airport road as she traveled to visit an Iraqi child injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this war.
Only a few hours before her death, Marla sent me this photo of Harah. She was 3 months old when she was thrown from a vehicle just before it was destroyed by a U.S. rocket attack. Her entire family was killed. Hers just one example of the hundreds of lives Marla and Faiz touched with their heroic work.
Their deaths are profound losses not only for their family and friends, but for the entire world. There are precious few who have the courage to stand up and demand justice for all the victims of conflict wherever they may be. This troubled world cannot afford to lose people like them.
Marla overflowed with passion and had an incredible sense of obligation to help those less fortunate. She worked tirelessly to push the US military on its responsibility to keep a proper accounting of the consequences of military action on civilians in Iraq.
While her incredible passion and courage never faded, she was often torn between concern for her personal safety and a fervent desire to be in the field. She recently moved to New York City and was eager to establish a base after spending so many years living out of her suitcase and on the couches of friends, including mine.
While she was serious about her work, Marla never forgot to have fun and was always the life of the party. She had an incredible knack for making friends -- we couldn’t walk a block in DC without her running into people she knew. I, along with human rights workers, journalists and many others have been bolstered by her spirit and drive.
It is crucial that Marla and Faiz be commemorated and that their work continue. I can assure you, we will continue to shine a spotlight on innocent victims of war and ensure that their crucial work is continued.
Thank you all for your support.
with love and peace,
April Pedersen
april (at) democracyinaction.org
Click here to read our 2005 goals and please make a donation to help us continue Marla's work.
More information will be available in the coming hours.
www.civicworldwide.org
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/04/1733520.php |
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Country's Violence Catches Up to U.S. Crusader in Iraq |
by Doug Smith
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
18 Apr 2005
|
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, Afghanistan.
"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 San Francisco 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.
It wasn't clear where Ruzicka was going, 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-bomb attacks.
Raised in conservative Lakeport, Calif., north of San Francisco, the 5-foot-3 Ruzicka was a high school basketball star and a leading three-point shooter. She also showed an early attraction toward 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 her parents' home in Lakeport on Sunday, said his twin 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 Ruzicka family on Sunday after learning of her death, recalling that reading the novel "Cry, the Beloved Country" and watching a videotape of the slaying of a young American woman in South Africa had ignited the desire in her to do humanitarian work.
During her college years at Long Island University she traveled to countries including Cuba, Guatemala and Costa Rica. When she visited Israel, she also traveled to Ramallah on 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, who was the Green Party's candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2000.
She 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.
Ruzicka 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. Although the currently accepted figure, based largely on news accounts, is between 17,000 and 20,000, Ruzicka's stands out because of the detail it contains, said Newsweek reporter Owen Matthews, a friend of Ruzicka.
Several friends said Ruzicka experienced steep emotional swings and had a troubled side to her life that drove her.
"This was her therapy," said Matthews.
As she struggled to build her own organization, Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, 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 assistance 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 in aid to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Her own fund-raising 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 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," Benjamin 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, every excursion by Westerners outside a guarded compound 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 flowing abaya and head coverings that Western women now use in transit. Still, ebullient and given to an irrepressible laugh, Ruzicka hardly blended in. Humanitarian organizations shun publicity, but Ruzicka openly courted the media.
"I need it for my fund raising," 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 a baby girl and once again flying for Iraqi Air, he was doing his last tour with Ruzicka.
Despite the risks, Ruzicka traveled all over Baghdad. In one day, she met a government minister, visited a hospital, 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 had visited Hassan in the northern city and thought she could find a sponsor to get him to Oakland for surgery. The family had taken out passports and Ruzicka was working on getting visas. A doctor was going to be hired to make X-rays. Matthews said he was going to lend her $300.
On Saturday, Ruzicka 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, Austria; Amman, Jordan; Washington and San Francisco. Late in the day, Bashir, the wounded young Iraqi's brother-in-law, answered a phone in Mosul and learned that the boy's benefactor would not return.
On the day before she died, Ruzicka 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."
Staff writers Jia-Rui Chong in Los Angeles, Saif Rasheed and Raheem Salman in Baghdad, and Times correspondent Robert Hollis in Lakeport contributed to this article.
© 2005 LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/ |
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Remembering a Friend Killed in Iraq, Marla Ruzicka |
by Kevin Danaher and Medea Benjamin
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
19 Apr 2005
|
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.
Kevin Danaher, Veteran Human Rights Activist and co-founder of Global Exchange, will discuss long term responses to terrorism and grassroots ways to respond to global economic forces. Medea Benjamin is Founding Director of Global Exchange. For over twenty years, Medea has supported human rights and social justice struggles around the world.
http://www.commondreams.org |
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