Armed only with her humanity, Marla Ruzicka did the impossible.  Virtually alone, she directed attention and resources to the invisible victims of war.  She moved the military without using force, galvanized official Washington without powerful connections, and motivated the press without sensationalism --- just intimate connection to civilians whose deaths she documents and grieved.  Her work was a triumph of the heart.

• Sarah Sewell, Boston Globe, 4/25/05

Marla Ruzicka died by gunfire at age 28. Like those she so passionately helped, she was a civilian victim of the armed conflict in Iraq.

From a young age Marla was moved by the plight of suffering peoples around the world and took action.  She worked with people with AIDS in Zimbabwe and refugees in Palestine, and then took a job with the human rights organization, Global Exchange.

While leading a Global Exchange tour of Afghanistan, Marla so was moved by the plight of civilians whose lives were impacted or ended by actions of the U.S. military that she stayed on in Afghanistan to help out.  She single-handedly organized a survey of the effects of the U.S. military action on Afghan civilians.  Then she used the information from the survey to lobby the U.S. government for aid for families who were harmed.    

She arrived in Iraq the day Saddam Hussein’s statue fell and began going door-to-door to identify Iraqi war victims and their families.  She took the results back to Washington and successfully lobbied Congress to start a fund to help these Iraqi civilians.  To date, $25 million has been appropriated for the Marla Ruzicka Iraqi War Victims Fund, and another $14 million has been earmarked for similar assistance to Afghan civilians.  

Marla worked for peace without taking sides.  She had empathy and compassion for all those involved in the war, from civilians to soldiers, politicians to warlords.  They felt her sincerity and became her helpers and allies.  It was hard to say “no” to her charisma and the moral force of her requests.

Day to day in Iraq she put her life on the line, making risky trips to visit Iraqis and providing the help they needed, whether it was financial support, medical care, or the removal of cluster bombs from their neighborhoods.  Getting help required frequent and extremely dangerous trips to the Baghdad airport to talk to U.S. officials, dangerous because of Iraqi insurgent attacks on U.S. military convoys traveling the airport road.  It was on that road on April 16, 2005, that she and her Iraqi colleague, Faiz Ali Salim, were killed, caught between a suicide bomber and a U.S. military convoy.  

To ensure that her work would be larger than herself, in 2003, Marla created an NGO, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC). This organization continues the work to this day.

“[There is] a terrible, plain truth that too many politicians, soldiers and journalists tend to ignore when they dare to talk about the dead and wounded in war as statistics for history books. Each number is a story of someone who left a family behind.”
            -  Marla Ruzicka

Resources:

• “The Human Side of Civilian Casualties.”  Washington Post.com, byline: William M. Arkin – a moving description of how Marla worked and of her immense compassion for all parties involved in the war
• CIVIC – Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict - the NGO Marla started which is continuing her work
• Sweet Relief: the Marla Ruzicka Story.  Biography by Jen Abrahamson
• “An American Activist Who Dared to Help Iraqi Victims.” 
• Christian Science Monitor, 4/17/05, byline: Jill Carroll

Receive a free Peace Quote screensaver with any purchase from Keep It Simple, or purchase the screensaver.