Amid the tributes to Ruzicka that were featured prominently in the U.S. media, no mention was made of the survey findings: 1,995 dead and 4,959 injured in the first 50 days of the invasion.
I wrote the following piece in tribute to Marla after my friends in GNN asked me to submit something about my work with her in Iraq.
I worked with Marla for more than six months, we met in Baghdad immediately after the end of the war. She had ideas about how to start documenting cases of civilians killed in the war, and I was interested in starting a survey about that too, so we started working together.
We started the work under the name “Iraqi civilian victims compassion campaign”, and then she changed the name to CIVIC. Marla was the project manager, she was responsibly of both fund raising and PR, and I was the country director that established small teams across the country to start the massive scale survey. I published the work on http://civilians.info because Marla didn’t have the chance to publish it on the official website of CIVIC worldwide.
Marla was very energetic, she didn’t waist a single minute without doing work. She used to swim for long hours so that she won’t waste the time of her break doing nothing. Marla and I spent hours and days traveling around the country in small uncomfortable taxi cars, we went all around the south, and the north. I remember one time when she decided to sneak out of the taxi in Najaf and go walk around the shrine of the holly shia city. I came back to the car and freaked out because she wasn’t there! I asked the driver in a loud voice: “How did you let her go alone! She doesn’t speak Arabic!”, the other thing that made me feel worried was that it’s not really familiar to have women going around Najaf without covering their hair. I really thought she would be in trouble, so I went running in the street trying to find her, and it seems that some people figured out that I was searching for the blonde stranger, so they started shouting ” Mister… Mister… from there!” I followed their advice and found her in the middle of a group of 50 men, women and children totally shocked to see an American without a gun! she was shaking hands with them and saying “sorry … sorry … sorry we invaded your country … sorry we killed your people…”.
I stopped there with the people, and smiled while watching her. I was sure no one understood what she was saying, but people knew she was being nice and friendly. I would have advised her not to do such a thing if she asked me, but she didn’t. Yet, I kind of felt happy she did that. 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.
Marla left her country and put herself in danger for years in Afghanistan and Iraq trying to help people effected by wars that she apposed. She will stay in the memory of hundreds of Iraqis as a symbol of anti-war Americans who tried to fix what their government did in Iraq.
It is a sad irony that the very tables that we created to contain names of civilian casualties, contain her name now.
Many friends of Marla, including myself, will try to continue the work she started.
