LAKEPORT, California, 25 April 2005 — One week after Marla Ruzicka was killed in a suicide bombing in Baghdad, hundreds gathered here Saturday at a funeral mass where the young American woman was remembered as a hero for her courageous campaign to help war victims.
The gathering in her northern California hometown drew celebrities and prominent politicians, from the reporters who knew her intimately to actor Sean Penn and US Sen. Barbara Boxer, who eulogized the 28-year-old activist.
Through her organization Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflicts, Ruzicka had worked extensively in Iraq and in Afghanistan to document the exact number of civilians killed or injured by US forces, and helped victims receive $10 million in compensation from the US government.
Ruzicka lived “under the guideline ‘their tragedies are my responsibilities’,” Boxer, of California, said at the funeral.
The Reverend Ted Oswald, who said mass, found it “sad that it takes a young girl’s death to understand what she accomplished. It’s just unbelievable what she did.”
“I count her among my heroes,” said Penn, who has traveled to Iraq and wrote about his experience in a California newspaper.
Ruzicka was traveling toward Baghdad airport on April 16 when her car was hit by a suicide car bomb, which seemed aimed at a security convoy driving ahead of Ruzicka’s vehicle. Three others died in the bomb attack, including her Iraqi colleague, Faiz Ali Salim.
Her courage touched foreign correspondents who met the blond Californian while they were covering the conflicts.
Foreign correspondents this week wrote about their encounters with Ruzicka, remembering her blond hair and young face.
“At first, Ruzicka seemed too much of a flower child to be taken seriously,” wrote The Washington Post’s Pamela Constable, who met her in Afghanistan in 2001.
But, she said, “There was a determined agenda behind her ditsy persona, an earnest sense of purpose that enabled her to charm her way through military checkpoints and wring pledges of aid for war victims from congressional offices.”
In 2002 she led a group of Afghan families to the gates of the US Embassy to demand compensation for the victims.
“After that, we all viewed her with new respect,” Constable wrote.
In Iraq, another Washington Post reporter recalled that she had once thrown a party called “Baghdad Needs Some Love,” Constable wrote.
The New York Times’ Robert Worth, who saw her the night before she died, wrote about her “electric smile.” She was visiting Iraqi families that had lost relatives to the violence in Baghdad the day she was killed, Worth wrote. He wrote that a medic at the scene of the attack heard her last words: “I’m alive.”
CNN contributor Peter Bergen quoted the last e-mail he received from her about Iraq: “This place breaks my heart. Need to get out of here, but with heart.”
