Ruzicka founded and headed CIVIC – the Campaign for Innocent Victims In Conflict, which tries to hold governments accountable for compensating the victims of wars. Though she’s often called an “aid” worker, she once corrected me on the label saying her group advocated for victims, bringing their suffering to the public, and did not provide direct aid. Much of her whole, short life had been as an advocate for various causes and her work in war showed how awareness, that overworked concept, can actually affect people lives.
Indeed, far from maintaining the aid worker profile of big budgets, SUVs and villas, Ruzicka worked on shoestring funding, bumming rides and accommodations from those she met along the way. Her main weapon was an iron-willed determination wrapped in a sunny – some might say relentless – charm. She worked extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq (along with other places) and reporters looked on in amazement as she would talk her way through checkpoints and closed doors we could never open. She was often disheveled and scattered – even waifish. But when she was asked about her work, she could deftly cite names, laws and figures in detail from memory.
She often hung out with reporters in part because, like us, she was in that very small group of Westerners in Iraq who were not employed by the U.S. government or its contractors, without access to things like embassy housing. She would throw parties or, more likely, convince others to host parties she wanted to throw since she usually had no living quarters of her own. She had ups and downs – personal baggage she would sometimes discuss. But in all the talk about her – and there is a lot of talk in the cliquish ranks of Westerners in Baghdad – I never heard anyone ever suggest that Ruzicka had done anything insincere or malicious. A biography of Ruzicka, titled “Sweet Relief” was published in 2006 and a Hollywood movie about her has been in the works. In other words, she is already legendary.
Ruzicka’s work was turning an important corner at the time she was killed. Her persistence had wrung important information about civilian casualties from the American military and the cause had been getting increased attention in Washington. According to CIVIC, a U.S. government fund spearheaded by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy has so far been budgeted $50 million to give medical care and vocational training to Iraqis wounded by U.S. troops and another fund for Afghanistan war victims has received $34 million.
Ruzicka brushed off friends’ advice to avoid Iraq as it descended into chaotic mayhem. And in Iraq, she took risks – though not wildly – to get close to war victims so she could hear and document their plight as well as give them hugs and make friends of many. She would come back to the reporter hotels with stories of specific people needing help or exposure and do the same later with political and military officials.
Her irrepressible cheerfulness, along with her petite physical stature, makes the thought of her so-brutal death all the more jarring and incongruous. Many pointed out the fact that she was a non-combatant killed like those for whom she sought to speak – mothers, fathers, children, innocents devastated by war, so often noted but unprotected. Her death also highlighted a less-obvious horror worth considering any time armed conflict is option. War often draws in extremely rare individuals acting selflessly on their own initiative and kills them.
