Good Article About Marla

Marla: Mission Continued

By Tai Moses, AlterNet. Posted April 17, 2006.


Humanitarian Marla Ruzicka had one goal: to lessen the
suffering of innocent people caught in the crossfire
of war.

Marla Ruzicka and an Iraqi child. Image courtesy of
CIVIC Worldwide.
Marla Ruzicka, Dec. 31, 1976 - April 16, 2005

It's been one year since a suicide car bomber killed
Marla Ruzicka and her colleague Faiz Ali Salim as they
were driving along the Baghdad airport road. The date
is marked on my calendar. Funny how these scribbled
reminders can affect you. You think it's not a big
deal -- just a date on the calendar -- and then the
day rolls around and you are visited anew by the
gravity of the loss.

Marla, of course, has not been forgotten. All year,
she's been popping up, making her presence felt in
different ways. She was posthumously given a Bridge of
Peace award from Global Village Foundation; a
fellowship was endowed in her name at Brown
University; she even has her own Wikipedia entry, a
fact she might have found hilarious. Recently I opened
a new collection of photographs called "Unembedded,"
and there on the title page was a dedication to Marla
and Faiz.

"Unembedded" is the visual chronicle of a world with
which Marla was intimately familiar: wartime Iraq.
There are photos of a father holding the hand of his
dying child, bereaved women praying at a mosque,
children playing in the street in front of an American
tank. There are also scenes of people sharing a meal,
dancing at a wedding, swimming in the Euphrates river.
Even in a ruined country, people get on with their
lives.

A doctor quoted in "Unembedded" says, "War wounds are
always multiple wounds." Iraq's war wounds have
multiplied in the year since Marla died. The
occupation continues, the country still lacks an
established government, and civilians are being
injured and killed in greater numbers than ever.
Abductions are common, mass graves have been
unearthed, Iraqi journalists and politicans have been
assassinated. Dozens of bodies showing signs of
torture are found almost daily on the streets of
Baghdad. U.S. troops are still dying, getting maimed,
coming home irrevocably damaged. Reconstruction
efforts are hampered by the inability to provide
security for workers...the grim litany goes on and on.

I am hard-pressed to find any glimmers of hope in this
picture. Yet none of it, I suspect, would have
deterred Marla. She had one goal: to lessen suffering.
She did this doggedly, radiantly, personally. In an
op-ed she wrote shortly before she died, she explained
the importance of counting the dead and injured
civilians: "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."

This was not just empty rhetoric. Marla wanted to
humanize the rising numbers of war, to give each
victim back their name and face and record their
story. She knew that people are moved, not by
abstractions, but by the stories of real people. If
your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close
enough, said photojournalist Robert Capa. Marla's
pictures were all close-ups.

After her death, Marla's family and friends resolved
to continue her work -- a task they have undertaken
with a passion and tenaciousness that would have made
Marla proud. They have turned CIVIC (Campaign for
Innocent Victims in Conflict), the NGO Marla
singlehandedly founded in 2003, into a functioning
organization with a board of directors and two
full-time staffers: associate director Marla
Bertagnolli (known as Marla B), and executive
director, Sarah Holewinski, who made her first trip to
Iraq in March.

I spoke with Holewinski by telephone not long after
she returned. Her experience in Iraq, she said, was
both exhilarating and exhausting. "Humanitarian work
is not what it was when Marla started CIVIC," she told
me. "There are places in Iraq I cannot go and meet
with the families, because they would be targets and I
would be targeted. But there's also this sense of hope
and optimism, because there are so many people who
want to help."

Holewinski, like Marla, is dedicated to keeping the
faces of civilian casualties front and center in the
hopes of making it impossible for us to ignore the
human consequences of our country's actions in Iraq.
On CIVIC's website you can read about some of these
people; 13-year-old Marwa, for instance, who was badly
injured when a coalition shell struck her home in
2003, killing her mother. CIVIC arranged to have her
flown to Los Angeles for reconstructive surgery at
UCLA, which agreed to cover the costs. There are
accounts of other Iraqis, too, whose stories have less
hopeful outcomes.

"The stories make the difference for us," said
Holewinski. "We're in this work because we understand
that every one of those numbers -- no matter what you
believe, whether the casualty count is 30,000 or
100,000 -- every one is a life. People come to this
work because they get those stories and that makes
sense to them."

The effectiveness of such stories was behind one of
Marla's greatest triumphs. With the support of Sen.
Patrick Leahy, Marla successfully lobbied Congress to
create a fund for victims of war. Currently $38
million has been allocated to help the families of
civilians harmed by U.S. military operations in Iraq
and Afghanistan. The Marla Ruzicka Iraqi War Victims'
Fund, as it was named after her death, is administered
through USAID and is unique in its emphasis on
income-generating projects; it pays medical bills,
rebuilds homes, helps Iraqis start new businesses or
rebuild ones that have been destroyed. CIVIC has been
instrumental in helping distribute the aid money.

CIVIC follows Marla's pragmatic strategy of steering
clear of the antipathy between antiwar activists and
the military. It was not her practice to denounce the
military but to insistently pressure them to consider
the welfare of ordinary citizens in their operations,
and to make that a stated policy. She persuaded people
whose help she needed that the goal of protecting the
lives of the innocent was not partisan, but an
objective everyone could share.

"You would think people would be at odds, but they're
not," Sarah Holewinski said. "If you focus solely on
the human costs of war, then everyone -- the media,
the military, government officials, activist
organizations -- everyone has a stake in this,
everyone wants to do their part."

Someone made a short video portrait of Marla that was
shown at one of her memorials. Watching it, I was
struck by how frequently she touches people; both
friends and total strangers. She kissed, she hugged
spontaneously, she reached for people's hands, held
their children on her lap. She doled out love
unstintingly, and almost universally, people dropped
their guard and responded to her.

Raed Jarrar, who went door to door with Marla
collecting data on civilian deaths in Iraq, remembered
watching her wade into a crowd of Iraqi men, women and
children, shaking every hand she could reach, and
saying, "Sorry ...sorry...sorry we invaded your
country...sorry we killed your people."

"I was sure no one understood what she was saying,"
Jarrar wrote, "but people knew she was being nice and
friendly. It was a nice move to have more personal
contact with Iraqis at the time that any foreigner was
a big mystery. It was important to tell Iraqis that
not all Americans come with guns, some of them come
with smiles and hopes to make friends."

Holewinski says the country's communications
infrastructure is so deteriorated that some of the
Iraqis she met who had known Marla had not heard of
her death. "To tell them and see the look on their
face -- it's another tragedy for them, and they're
devastated," she said. "When they see that CIVIC is
carrying on her work, there are so many offers of
help, they want to help. They know that this is the
American success in Iraq -- helping the families and
knowing that we're going to do everything we can."

I asked her how she kept her spirits up in the face of
all the suffering she witnessed doing humanitarian
work. She admitted she had felt a little dejected on
the flight home. "When you go to a war zone it's
really easy to come back and think, this is so
depressing and it's never going to get better." She
paused. "Then, you meet someone like Marla or the
Iraqis who really want to help their people, and that
one word of encouragement means that you're going to
go on, and that exponentially multiplies."

In the memorial he wrote about her on Salon, Phillip
Robertson called Marla an "enemy of war," a phrase I
cannot get out of my head. New York Times
correspondent Chris Hedges used the same phrase in the
conclusion of his address to the Rockford College
graduating class of 2003: "Friendship--or, let me say
love--is the most potent enemy of war."

Hedges was heckled throughout his speech and nearly
booed offstage, for to suggest during a time of war
that love is stronger than brute force, that people
should help instead of hate, is a radical idea. (It's
also the most basic tenet of Christianity, but never
mind.) Marla embodied this concept, and so did
Margaret Hassan and Tom Fox, to pick two other aid
workers killed in Iraq over the course of this war.

After Hassan was abducted and murdered in 2004, Tom
Fox wrote in his blog that "the Quran teaches that an
innocent person who is killed travels as quickly as
does light to the gates of Paradise." Marla left us at
the speed of light. But she lives on in so many ways:
in the Iraqi War Victims fund for which she fought so
hard; in the determination and love of the staff and
volunteers of CIVIC; and in the hearts of all the
people who were moved by her example to do good. She
had a genius for inspiring ordinary people to do
extraordinary things. Marla didn't want to save the
world, she just hoped to make it "a little bit
better." And she has.

CIVIC is holding a "Week of Action" in Marla's honor.
To take part or to learn more, visit the website.
CIVIC's new project, I Care, also launches today.

Tai Moses is the senior editor of AlterNet