Not your average surf girl (1976-2005)

It was more than fifteen years ago that Marla Ruzicka perished in Iraq. You may not know who she was. To put it simply: she was a heroine. There is no other way to describe her. She did something almost none of us do: she traveled to extremely dangerous, war-ravaged parts of the world that were totally unknown to her, to assist people in need. She did this on her own initiative and without any formal training. And she paid for it with her life. 
She should not be forgotten, especially since the organisation she started single-handedly lives on and has grown bigger than she maybe would have thought possible. That is why I decided to re-publish a story I wrote years ago about her. It is in fact an interview with her successor, Sarah Holewinski.

There are countless lobby-organisations, but only one of them works for people caught in the midst of war: the 'Center for civilians in conflict', formerly known as CIVIC. Its founder paid with her life for her ideals: Marla Ruzicka, a bundle of vitality and determination, was killed in a suicide attack in Iraq eight years ago yesterday. She was 28 years old. ,,I think she did not want to be ashamed of her nationality, so she came into action," says her successor Sarah Holewinski, who is continuing Ruzicka’s work with similar zeal.

Carl Stellweg

The weblog honouring the memory of Marla Ruzicka had been in existence for more than five years before sergeant William Gable discovered it. ,,I never (...) really looked into it,’’ he writes on 30 May 2010. ,,I was one of three soldiers who realized that Marla had not died from the car bomb and quickly put her on to a stretcher and transported her to a hospital (…) the image of her face will never escape my thoughts. I dream about that day repeatedly and can still see her look up and (...) say to us "I'm an American."

For some heroes or heroines there’s no happy ending. That very same day – 16 April  2005 – the American activist Marla Ruzicka did pass out, at the age of 28, in a hospital in Baghdad as a victim of a suicide attack aimed not at her, but at a military convoy.

It is perhaps a sad consolation that she died in harness, on her way to those attending to a three year old girl whose father and mother had been killed when an American rocket hit their van. The child escaped, probably because it was thrown out of the car window by one of the parents just before the vehicle caught fire.

Ruzicka was the founder and the only person working full-time for CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict) – to this day the only organisation in the world lobbying for the interests of civilian victims in war situations.

In Iraq, at the time, every day hundreds of thousands of people risked meeting their deaths the same way Marla did. What was special about her was that everyone in this torn country deeply regretted her death, whatever side the sympathies were on. 

Whether they were Iraqis with a hatred against the ‘occupying forces’ or  those occupying forces themselves; whether they were cynical journalists, weary aid workers or suspicious American bureaucrats: Marla had managed to find her way into all their hearts. 

Within two days after the tragic news numerous emotional in memoriams appeared from journalists who had known her.

,,Of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have strutted through Iraq in the last two years - soldiers, bureaucrats, journalists and businessmen - she always seemed to me the most admirable,”  British journalist and Iraq veteran Patrick Cockburn wrote in The Independent.

And Time journalist Simon Robinson: ,,We didn't know what to make of Marla Ruzicka. Young, blonde, relentlessly buoyant and sometimes giggly, she stood out among the tired, cynical hacks and aid workers that usually populate war zones, so much so that battle-weary journalists nicknamed her "Bubbles" in the early days. In Kabul and Baghdad (..) Marla was the life of the party. She would rent a house for a day, arrange food and drink (…)  inviting us to a celebration that sometimes ended with a display of her enviable salsa-dancing skills.’’

However, as the Time journalist adds, behind her exterior of surf girl and her taste for parties there was a ‘fearsome determination’ and an ‘astonishing compassion’. Qualities that helped her to extract millions of dollars of aid money from the American government – and all that without influential connections or a slick lobbying organisation. CIVIC itself was a lobbying organisation: albeit a totally unique one.

Her achievements were all the more impressive given that in Iraq records were kept of soldiers killed, but that there were practically no data regarding numbers and identities of civilians who had fallen victim to military actions, whether or not intentionally. 

Estimates by the British government were according to their own sources unreliable to such an extent that the information was ‘unsuitable’ for publication.  ‘The methodology for a proper count is lacking’, as they put it.  American Ministry of Defence figures were classified.

In addition, Washington as well as London took the formalist point of view that the  Geneva Convention, in which the ‘rules of war’ are laid down, did not oblige them to record the number of civilian victims of a conflict.

However, there was in Iraq some kind of procedure with military lawyers judging civilians’ claims for damages. The tenor of this was that the army was under no obligation whatsoever to compensate, except in cases of clear-cut war crimes. And lawyers employed by the army obviously saw it primarily as their task to do all they could to contradict any allegations in that direction.

And so, not a penny was paid to the relatives of a 16-year old student, shot dead because soldiers mistook his rucksack for a bomb parcel. A ‘justified act of war’, it was called.

And take those two fishermen on the Tigris who were attacked from a helicopter, with fatal consequences. Their relatives received 3500 dollars. Not because of their deaths – which, once again, was alleged to be the result of a ‘justified act of war’ – but because of the loss of the boat, nets and a mobile phone.

Final example: the woman who on 21 November 2006 lost an eye because the car in which she was travelling, and which was driven by her brother, came under fire. The car had to swerve to avoid a bus and as a result came too close to an American convoy.

The bullet, aimed at the woman’s brother, penetrated her eye-socket. 

Although the American soldiers could see that she was bleeding heavily and that her eyeball was in her hand, they failed to take her to the hospital. In the end a lorry driver did, probably saving the woman’s life. She turned out not to be eligible for compensation.

It might be disingenuous to fit Marla Ruzicka out with wings and put her on a cloud in the hereafter, with a nice view of the earthly mess. But that would make her see that the end of her life did not signify the end of her organisation. 

The Center for Civilians in Conflict as CIVIC is now called, is active not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Lybia, Mali, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria. Right now its staff numbers eleven people (including three interns). Apart from that, a large number of advisors and field workers is involved with the Center for Civilians in Conflict.

The organisation’s leadership is currently in the hands of Sarah Holewinski (35).

Formerly working for Human Rights Watch, she came into contact with Marla Ruzicka when the human rights organisation provided her with an office. Soon Sarah became involved with Marla’s work, but the two were not allowed enough time to get to know each other well.

Sarah had no choice but to take control after Marla had been killed. And that was no easy task. ,,Marla was a phenomenon. What was CIVIC without her? Every colleague was deeply depressed by her death. With a great deal of effort we managed to resume work. Backing out was not an option, because we were the only organisation of its kind. We realised that we filled a gap, and therefore we felt that we should not give up.”

This was a reason for continuing that the CIVIC workers could cling to. Perhaps they also found encouragement in the fact that Marla’s philosophy had borne fruit. She owed her success not only to her idealism and her disarming ways. She had also been extremely pragmatic, which was quite remarkable for someone who had moved in uncompromising left-wing activist circles from the time she was fifteen, and who had once loudly interrupted a speech by Jeffrey Skilling, the leader of the fraudulent energy supplier Enron (recorded in the 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room).

,,By and by Marla came to understand that she could achieve more by not antagonising her opponents,’’  Holewinski says. ,,She switched the focus from guilt to responsibility. She did not try to end wars, because she knew that that was impossible. It was however possible to do something about the suffering of innocent civilian victims, and that’s what she focused on. ”

Marla’s spirit lives on in the pragmatic course that the organisation kept following. A course that also entails restrictions. Sarah Holewinski makes an essential distinction between warring parties operating within the framework of international law and those operating outside it. CIVIC only deals with the first category.

,,We can do nothing in Congo, where the killing, wounding and deprivation of civilians is happening deliberately, as a war strategy. For the same reason we will not get involved with the Taliban. War crimes must be tried, which is a separate issue. We negotiate with parties that inflict suffering on civilians without intending to do so – parties that recognise international law, in which it is laid down that civilians should be spared. ”

The problem in respect of this latter principle is that it is non-committal: there will always be civilian victims in armed conflicts.  People who find themselves near a military target at the wrong moment are often done for. This will invariably be the case in tomorrow’s wars. And there will be nothing to oblige warring parties to offer assistance or to pay damages.

Holewinksi: ,,We find this situation unacceptable. Everyone should. But that is not our only argument in our talks with military representatives. We also point out to them that it is directly in their interest not to turn civilians into enemies. Of course they are already aware of this: the famous doctrine of winning hearts and minds. The only thing is that they should not apply this doctrine whenever it suits them, but in all circumstances. In the end this will always be advantageous to all parties concerned. A third argument is that reconstruction after a war is more likely to be successful after wounds have healed. A compensation system for damages can function as a basis for stability.”

What has the Center for Civilians in Conflict achieved in the course of the years? There is a Marla Ruzicka Fund for iraqi war victims, to which American Congress has paid tens of millions of dollars. ISAF, the security mission in Afghanistan in which more than 40 countries participate, has adopted mutual guidelines for compensating victims. On top of that, numerous programmes have been set up to instruct soldiers to show more concern in their contacts with civilians.

Here again the problem is that these guidelines are non-committal. They are not institutionalised. ,,That should be the next step,’’ Holewinski says. ,,Parties should truly commit themselves to pay damages. It should be unthinkable to inflict suffering on civilians and then just leave them to it, with the excuse that you did not mean it like that.”

And there are new challenges, as Holewinski explains in an interview with Foreign Affairs Magazine. ‘The United States are now transitioning from massive ground forces in a place, to counterrorism operations. That means: special forces, drones, and partnering with local forces. Special forces don’t have a good track record when it comes to abiding to the practices we want to see. And they will certainly not go back to compensate. Most of them don’t want to be known to have been there in the first place. Local forces are not being trained in civilian protection, at least not in a robust manner. And as far as drones are concerned: because there are no ground forces, we cannot address the harm they do.”

What drives the eloquent, dynamic Holewinski, who flies all over the place – to Somalia one week, to the States the next and to Kenya the week after – to do this work? 

,,I see it as a great privilege,’’ she says firmly. ,,Listen, there are many fantastic organisations helping people directly, on the spot. But we are doing something different: we are trying to bring about a change of policy, through which we can improve the lives of millions of people. Simply by changing the rules. Every day, the idea that this can actually happen gives me a very urgent reason to get up.’’

Does Holewinski, finally, have any idea as to what moved her predecessor to take such enormous risks? ,,She saw what her own country was doing to civilians. That touched her, I think. She did not want to be ashamed of her nationality and that’s why she came into action.  She took her responsibility. Perhaps she didn’t realise that what the United States are doing is happening all over the world.”

Then was it perhaps from a feeling of wounded patriotism that Marla Ruzicka, in her last moments, and with all the strength left within her, spoke the words ‘I’m an American’  to sergeant William Gable? In order to account for her actions once more? No one will ever know. Marla was a heroine pur sang, so she should be an angel now. And angels enjoy the privilege of remaining silent.