Three Years Gone

[Hissyspit]

Anyone who has ever seen one of my posts and noticed the signature line in them has read her name and seen the date.

Three years gone now and the Iraq occupation and conflagration continues, more civilian victims of bombings reported on Tuesday. On April 16, 2005, young humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka died in Baghdad, Iraq, on the infamous Airport Road, along with her Iraqi translator. For a short time, she was in the consciousness of at least some of the public, as someone who was trying to bring attention to the impact our "foreign policy" fiasco was having, and then, as yet another American who would lose their life in the increasingly violent and out-of-control carnage that Iraq was becoming.

A movie based on her life is supposedly currently in production, with a release date of 2009 and Kirsten Dunst slated to play Ms. Ruzicka. Details on the efforts and impact of Marla Ruzicka can be found in a 2005 article from Rolling Stone magazine: information on her life, her launching of CIVIC, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, an organization whose purpose was the counting of casualties and assistance to victims of the Iraq disaster, her battle with her bipolar disorder, memories from her brother, and her discovery of information that the U.S. military, despite public denial, were keeping track of civilian casualites. Of Marla, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), who sponsored legislation to provide $10 million in U.S. aid to innocent Iraqis who had been harmed by the US military, thanks to activism on the part of Ms. Ruzicka, said, "Marla Ruzicka is out there saying, 'Wait, everybody. Here is what is really happening. You'd better know about this.' We have whistle blowers in industry. Maybe sometimes we need whistle blowers in foreign policy."

She functions as a symbol, true, a symbol of people who are willing to put into action their best humanistic and empathetic convictions, but having been aware of her work before her death and admiring of her compassion and tenacity, I hope that I, ultimately, remember her and memorialize her as an individual, as an exceptional one, but also as "just another" among the numbers of the many of whom she tried to keep track, individuals despite their statistical status, individuals who have been victims of the insane, disingenuous and callous behaviors of the radical extremist cartel that the American people allowed to gain control of their government - two of who appear in my signature line as caricatures.

Below is some more information about Marla. I would hope you might take some time today to look at some of it. Anniversaries can seem arbitrary, but the revolution around the sun is not arbitrary, years are real things; and the spinning of the globe is not arbitrary. Marla died in Spring on the other side of that globe from her native California in a place she called "home."

"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." - Tai Moses, Alternet, on observance of the one-year anniversary of Marla Ruzicka's death.

From Rolling Stone:

- snip -

In the first week of April, Ruzicka obtained a detailed U.S. military civilian casualty report. Her source: a high-ranking U.S. general in Baghdad. It was perhaps the biggest achievement of Ruzicka's career. The number -- twenty-nine civilians killed in Baghdad from February 28th to April 5th -- was small. But what it meant was tremendous: It was proof, in her eyes, that despite the Pentagon's denials, the military did, to some degree, keep track of its actions. Elated, Ruzicka wrote her friend Peter Bergen, a writer and CNN commentator, in Washington. "Dude!...this is huge." After gushing about the party she was planning that evening -- "Now I must go and keep everyone happy" -- Ruzicka ended her note, as she almost always did: "I am being very safe."

Memorial Blog: http://marlaruzicka.blogspot.com

Video from local television on Ruzicka's death: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKRkGkAILb4

Video of an interview with Jennifer Abrahamson, the author of "Sweet Relief," on the death of Marla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWdrdZVOdEU

Here is the article from Rolling Stone in 2005:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7371965/the_girl_who_tried_to_save_the_world

The Girl Who Tried to Save the World
The heroic life and final days of Marla Ruzicka, an American martyr

JANET REITMAN
Posted Jun 02, 2005 12:00 AM

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 16th, Marla Ruzicka sat in her unarmored Mercedes, talking on the phone with her friend Colin McMahon, a reporter in the Baghdad bureau of the Chicago Tribune. She'd had a "great" round of meetings in the Green Zone, she told McMahon, and was just leaving the fortified compound in the hopes of squeezing in one last meeting before the end of the day. The Green Zone, which sits on the west bank of the Tigris River, used to be the heart of Saddam's empire, and now houses the U.S. Embassy, the Iraqi Parliament and other offices of the new Iraqi government. Outside of the Green Zone, in Baghdad itself, the security situation changes hourly. A route that was safe at noon could be unsafe at 1 p.m. A neighborhood that was peaceful at dawn could be in flames by lunchtime.

A petite, blond, twenty-eight-year-old humanitarian-aid worker from Northern California, Ruzicka knew the volatility of Baghdad as well as anyone. She was virtually the only American aid worker in the Iraqi capital. She was the founder of a small nongovernmental organization called CIVIC -- the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict -- which assisted families whose lives had been ripped apart in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Passionate and driven, Ruzicka worked seven days a week, eighteen hours a day, driving around the city with her Iraqi colleague Faiz Ali Salim. The two spent most of their days compiling data on the number of civilian casualties in Iraq, which Ruzicka then used to lobby American officials to compensate the victims' families, often arranging for wounded children to be evacuated in order to receive medical treatment in the United States. It was revolutionary work -- virtually no other aid group or worker has negotiated with the U.S. government on behalf of civilians injured in American military actions -- but it was exhausting. Ruzicka, who had begun to demonstrate some of the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, was preparing to leave Baghdad the next day for a vacation in Thailand and then a long rest back in the United States. Leaving was difficult. "This place continues to break my heart," she wrote to a friend in London earlier in the month. "Need to get out of here -- but hard!"

Now, talking on the phone with McMahon, Ruzicka sounded upbeat. In the past few days, she had obtained a document that was her holy grail: a detailed report showing that the U.S. military keeps its own civilian-casualty records, something the Pentagon has repeatedly denied.

Ruzicka's methodology, on behalf of Iraq's war victims, often involved a lot of cajoling of high-level brass at Camp Victory, the military headquarters near the Baghdad International Airport. To get there, she had to drive on the notorious airport road, one of the most dangerous thoroughfares in the world. It is a frequent site of suicide bombings, ambushes and other insurgent attacks. It's also an efficient route, connecting central Baghdad to points west.

The airport road is banked on both sides by housing complexes, heavily populated by people with military training and access to weapons. Ironically, it was once the most secure road in Iraq, as Saddam's particular brand of paranoia forced him to place guards at every overpass and exit. Today, it is the key military and contractors' supply route, which makes it one of the most high-value targets in Iraq, despite several U.S. military checkpoints. There are rules for driving on the airport road, the most important one being: Never get stuck behind a U.S. convoy, which is a suicide bomber's prime target. But this can be difficult, as security contractors, who drive in convoys of armored SUVs, fly down the highway at 90 mph. McMahon assumed Ruzicka was meeting with some Iraqi victims in Baghdad. But he never asked where she was going, and Ruzicka didn't offer any information. "I think it'll be fine," she told him breezily at the end of their brief phone call. Then she hung up. McMahon went back to work.

The Tribune office was at the Al Hamra hotel, where Ruzicka lived. The Hamra is the major journalist hangout in Baghdad and has an otherworldliness about it that gives some people a false sense of safety. A white, two-tower complex, it has a sweeping outdoor patio and a beautiful pool: long, cerulean blue and clean. On warm nights, journalists ranging from the most senior correspondents of Time to the lowliest stringer can be found doing laps in the pool, or having drinks or dinner on the patio. Every so often, a few tracer bullets from an AK-47 fly overhead like miniature bottle rockets, with clean, arcing trajectories, a piercing reminder of the danger and chaos so close at hand.

Marla Ruzicka was planning to host a party at the Hamra that night. Her all-night bacchanals of salsa dancing and heavy drinking were famous among the overworked, underexcited journalists in Baghdad. The party she'd planned for the night of April 16th promised to be "totally Marla," as one of her friends told me. The patio would be full, the music would be pumping. Several people might hook up, quite a few would jump in the pool and a lot might pass out -- the first one being Marla herself.

It was after eight o'clock when McMahon, still working, saw his colleague James Janega at the Tribune's office at the Hamra. Janega had been down on the patio, waiting for the party. "It's pretty boring, just about ten guys sitting around by the pool," he told McMahon. Marla, he added, hadn't shown up yet.

"She's not here yet?" Ruzicka would never be late to one of her own parties. In the next few hours, there would be frantic phone calls to sources and friends all over Baghdad, but no one had heard from Ruzicka. "The worst fear was that she'd been kidnapped," says McMahon. He imagined the pretty aid worker pleading for her life in front of insurgent cameras.

What happened to Marla Ruzicka was no less tragic but far more mundane. At approximately three o'clock in the afternoon, Ruzicka and Faiz were heading east on the airport road, toward Baghdad. Also on the road were a U.S. military convoy and a convoy of private security contractors. From a nearby on-ramp, a suicide bomber merged into the traffic, most likely gunning for the military convoy, which he missed. Instead, he detonated beside his next best choice, the security convoy. Behind them was a Mercedes.

The first time I met Marla -- like a lot of people, I never knew her last name until after she died -- was in Baghdad in April 2004. It was a warm night, and I was having drinks with some friends on the patio of the Hamra, when all of a sudden a pretty girl dressed in hip-huggers and a gauzy shirt bopped up and started massaging the shoulders of one of the men at my table.

"Hellooo," she said, in a slow California drawl.

A few men rolled their eyes discreetly. "That's Marla," one of them said in my ear, a hint of condescension in his voice.

Just five-foot-three and weighing no more than 100 pounds, Marla looked only a few years out of college and completely out of place in a war zone. But she also seemed thoroughly comfortable in the Hamra scene, as if it were her home, which it had been for the better part of two years. While we drank, Marla pounded the shoulders of a British reporter with tiny little fists, gradually making her way around the table until she'd given shoulder rubs to every guy in the room. "OK, bye!" she said, and flitted away.

MORE

Rest In Peace.

[SalmonChantedEvening]

1. RIP Marla

K&R

:cry:

[Hissyspit]

2. "Before the people of the world - let it now be noted here that this is what we stand for:

justice, truth... and the value of a single human being."

[babylonsister]

3. Very nice memorial, Hissy. Hard to believe 3 years have flown by. nt

[tom_paine]

4. Recommended. n/t

[bluesmail]

5. I donated to CIVIC. I live in Mendocino County, Ca

Her death made the paper here. I often wonder what happens to a soul when it is wiped out. Good that somebody decided to make a film on her life.

[Hissyspit]

6. End of day kick. n/t

[Gemini Cat]

7. RIP Marla

Thank-you for posting this. I've never forgotten her.

[SalmonChantedEvening]

8. Another kick for Marla and Hissy

:patriot: