The Innocent Victim

Last night I went to the Hamra hotel, home to most of the foreign journalists working in Baghdad, to attend one of Marla Ruzicka famous parties. She'd told me 8.30pm, but there was no sign of her in her room or elsewhere in the hotel and I couldn't get through to her phone. I spotted some journalists sitting by the pool and shyly enquired "Do any you know Marla?" They turned to me and laughed "Are you kidding. Of course we know Marla, everyone knows Marla!" But no one had seen her.

As the evening drew on, fashionably late turned into worryingly late. The last sighting of Marla was in the Green Zone at midday, and she'd been heading off to visit an Iraqi family with an injured kid. Then at 1am I head the dreadful news, she had been killed. The initial reports were confusing, so I quizzed everyone I could thing about for information and then started searching for contact numbers and emails to inform her friends and colleagues back in the US. Most people had gone to bed so I sat up alone in the Washington Post house and they kindly let me use their phones to call the US. A big hearted guy, Colin, had already gotten the PalmPilot from her room and called her family, who had already heard the news from the US State Department. I finally went to sleep on a sofa for a few hours at 4.30am, unclear on the precise circumstances of her death or the fate of her Iraqi colleague Faiz.

At 9am this morning I learnt that there had been a carbombing on the Airport Road, near Hay al-Adil district, about 4pm, and it seemed likely that this was what killed Marla. This was confirmed when I talked with someone who had been in the private security convoy which was the target of the attack. She told me that she'd seen a Mercedes car, fitting the description of Faiz's car, completely incinerated in the blast. It is a small mercy that her death was instantaneous. A friend visited the hospital in the Green Zone and helped me talk to the chief nurse there. They had received two badly burned bodies but had no ID on them. I considered going in to do this, but the bodies had already been moved elsewhere for biopsies and DNA tests. Someone else IDed them and the US embassy issued a press release a few hours ago confirming this.

I started emailing with Marla in June 2003 when I learnt about the pioneering work she was doing identifying and trying to secure support for civilian victims of the war and their families. When we met in Baghdad in 2003 I could see the energy, compassion and charisma bubbling out of her.

This gutsy 27yr old Californian had started the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) while working in Afghanistan in 2002. She entered Iraq immediately following the fall of Baghdad, and rapidly began organizing a survey of civilian casualties along with my friend Raed. This is still the most detailed attempt to gather specific data about specific victims, and whenever I have read out lists of the dead at protests, such as in Chicago in January, I have always used this data.

But this was not data collection for its own sake. Marla held a belief which one who think uncontroversial, that innocent victims in conflict or their families should receive some kind of restitution. Any country that claims to be fighting a "just" war for "moral" reasons, as the US and allies did in the 2003 invasion, should as a matter of course care for those caught in the crossfire. However this is not the case and Marla had an uphill struggle to secure even the most basic assistance for the victims. The US doesn't do bodycounts, and the White House lawyers would never permit an official to talk about compensation for victims and risk opening up the way for liable suits. With the help of Senator Leahy, Marla managed to persuade Congress to set aside a tiny part of the $18.4bn Iraq appropriation as aid for victims rather than for US corporations. In addition Marla helped families to secure the salacia (blood money) payments from the US army, though there are capped at a paltry $2500. She was also involved in helping seriously injured children get treatment overseas and undoubtedly many other projects of which I'm unaware.

Marla's colleague in the US just sent around an email: saying: "One of Marla's favourite quotes from Ernesto che Guevera was: 'The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.' Marla had enough love to cover the planet." Marla was a normal person not a saint, but she was driven by this great feeling of love and it was indeed leading her to try and cover the planet -certainly all the warzones on the planet - almost single handedly! A few months ago she visited Nepal with a view to expanding CIVIC's work to that wartorn country, and many other parts of the world would have benefited from her gumption. It is critical that Marla's work continues.

In the short term, along with her many other friends, here I am trying to find out about individuals she was helping her and ensure they are not abandoned. In the long term I pray that Marla's life may be an inspiration to many people to carry on CIVIC's work. We are in a stake of shock about her tragic death but Marla would be the first to remind us that she chose to put herself in risk. Much more tragic, she would say, are the thousands of civilians victims in Iraq and many other countries, particularly children, who never had any choice about being in a conflict zone. We mustn't forget Marla and we mustn't forget them.

Search Googlenews for stories about Marla