marginallymanic
Cabinet Minister
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| Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2005 8:35 am Post subject: "She was a cham |
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By MARK MACKINNON
Tuesday, April 19, 2005 Page A16
War, it goes without saying, is horrifying and unfair. But there are days when it can seem impossibly worse than even those two adjectives convey.
Saturday afternoon, on the highway that links Baghdad to its main airport, my friend Marla Ruzicka was killed by a roadside bomb. The 28-year-old Californian had devoted her life to a cause few others would dream of taking up -- securing compensation for civilian war victims in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Using smiles, hugs and cold hard facts to win over bereaved families, Afghan warlords, coalition soldiers and U.S. senators, Marla succeeded where few thought she could, and persuaded her government to pay millions of dollars in compensation to the families of civilians killed and wounded in the war on terror.
When she arrived in Kabul in 2001, many rolled their eyes at the bubbly young blonde who sounded so astonishingly naive when she spoke of her campaign to get the U.S. government to recognize the fatal mistakes it made during its campaign to oust the Taliban. I still have the cheap business card she gave me then -- a flimsy piece of paper bearing her name, a Yahoo e-mail account and a San Francisco street address.
She was a welcome burst of vivacity and cheer in a dreary combat zone, but many journalists despaired that her idealism was about to get badly bruised.
A year later, after she almost single-handedly persuaded the U.S. Congress to release millions of dollars for Afghan victims of the war, no one was snickering any more. When I saw her in Amman at the outbreak of the Iraqi war, sporting that same impish but determined smile while she made plans to head to Baghdad, I wasn't worried about her spirits any more -- they were clearly irrepressible. I just wondered whether the U.S. Army had any idea of the headaches she was about to cause them.
"What she wanted to do was eminently sensible," Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who helped pushed through a $17.5-million (U.S.) compensation package that Marla had proposed for Iraqi and Afghan civilians, told The Washington Post. "Unfortunately, things that are eminently sensible sometimes get lost in bureaucracy without a champion. She was a champion I would follow anywhere."
The 5-foot-3 former high-school basketball star was also an expert at cutting through cultural barriers. It would have been difficult to look more foreign in Iraq and Afghanistan than Marla did with her pale white face and her shoulder-length golden hair, but dressed in a neck-to-ankles black abaya, she was immediately accepted by victims' families, who saw that she came to them with an open heart.
What made her accomplishments all the more remarkable was how she did it with almost no financial support. Marla would show up on the edge of a war zone, charm her way into a free ride the rest of the way, then find a floor where she could sleep while visiting families and hounding U.S. officials.
Activism and helping others came naturally to Marla. Even before 2001, she worked with Palestinian refugees, Nicaraguan agricultural workers and Zimbabwean AIDS victims. She was suspended from school in 1991, while in the eighth grade, for leading a protest against the first Persian Gulf war. Her mother, Nancy, said yesterday that she always worried about her daughter's safety while she was in Iraq and Afghanistan but knew better than to try to stop her.
The day after Baghdad fell in 2003, Marla set up a network of volunteers to name and count all the civilian victims of the fighting. The detailed list she compiled of more than 2,000 deaths provided one of the first records of the war's toll. And her later tallies were crucial in coming up with the currently accepted figure of 17,000 to 20,000 fatalities.
Creating that list was in many ways a cause she died for. She told friends she had stayed in Iraq longer than planned this time because she had become convinced that the U.S. military had its own record of civilian casualties, something the Pentagon has always denied.
Marla understood that the news media could help her accomplish her goals. While other aid groups shunned the spotlight, she openly courted journalists. Unflappably cheerful amid the chaos around her, she threw salsa nights in Amman and pool parties at the al-Hamra hotel in Baghdad that no journalist, aid worker or diplomat in the area would dream of missing.
Once, concerned that another journalist and I looked stressed out after several weeks in Afghanistan, she tried mightily to teach us both yoga. It might have been the only endeavour she ever failed in.
Saturday, when she didn't turn up for another of her parties at the al-Hamra, her friends and colleagues knew something had gone wrong.
The blast that killed Marla was apparently aimed at a convoy of armoured jeeps driven by a private security company, but it's not yet clear why Marla and her long-time Iraqi aide and driver -- 43-year-old Faiz Ali Salim, who was also killed in the blast -- were on the road to Baghdad airport in the first place.
Because of the frequency of insurgent attacks there, it's considered the most dangerous stretch of pavement in Iraq. Foreigners travel it only if they have to catch a flight out, and Iraqis avoid it unless they need to ask for help from the U.S. forces based at the airport.
The answer may be found in a sadly prescient posting she wrote in her on-line journal in June.
"Back in Baghdad and happy. We have been working on submitting more compensation cases and encouraging the military to pay them out. In order to submit a case, we have to drive out to the airport," she wrote.
"The ride is not pleasant, military convoys passing every moment. Faiz and I hold our breath -- such convoys in that area are the target of rockets and fire from the resistance. It would be nice if there was a more secure location for Iraqis to seek compensation."
If you have time today, go to the website of the tiny NGO she set up, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict -- http://www.civicworldwide.org -- and take a look at Marla's journal and the work she did.
Spare a thought not just for her, but for the Afghan and Iraqi civilians she worked, and died, for trying to put a name and face to. It's the best tribute I can think of.
Marla was once asked by a reporter if she had ever considered a safer line of work. Her reply sang with the pure idealism she and a few other very special people are driven by:
"To have a job where you can make things better for people? That's a blessing. Why would I do anything else?"
Globe and Mail
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“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
Marcus Aurelius |
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