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    Hundreds mourn US woman fighting for Iraq war victims
    (Agencies)
    Updated: 2005-04-24 08:36

    One week after Marla Ruzicka was killed in a suicide bombing in Baghdad, hundreds gathered at a funeral mass where the young American woman was remembered as a hero for her courageous campaign to help war victims.


    US humanitarian aid worker Marla Ruzicka, 27, shown here on April 15. Ruzicka died in Iraq working for her non-governmental organization, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. [AFP]

    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 Senator 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 dollars in compensation from the US government.

    Ruzicka lived "under the guideline 'their tragedies are my responsabilities'," 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.

    Tim Rieser, foreign policy adviser to Senator Patrick Leahy, who pushed Congress to pass the compensation legislation, said: "Marla started something that remains unfinished but gives us an opportunity that we didn't have before."

    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.

    She managed to throw parties and find vodka, crashed in reporters' couches for the night and never had any money.

    "The men fell in love with her and the women were reminded of themselves, a decade or two younger," she 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."

    Journalists came from around the world to remember her at the mass Saturday.

    Catherine Philp, a friend of hers and a Times of London South Asia correspondent, remembered that Ruzicka gave hugs to whoever she felt needed one.

    "If we could all be like Marla and hug strangers," she said.

    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."



     
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