The global justice movement, at least in its current incarnation, is a young cause. Rooted in the anti-sweatshop campaigns of the 1990s and thrust onto the world stage by the Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999, the movement remains overwhelmingly youthful in composition, leadership and spirit.

As such, it has experienced few deaths of comrades - particularly among the legions of activists in the United States. Until now.

Marla Ruzicka, the 28-year-old head of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which worked to aid civilian victims of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, was killed Saturday on the road from Baghdad to that city's airport when her car was apparently caught between a suicide car bomber and a U.S. military convoy.

A veteran campaigner with Global Exchange, one of the most prominent groups in the global justice movement, Marla was one of many young activists who turned their attention from sweatshops and trade agreements to questions of war and peace after Sept. 11, 2001. But she took that attention further than most.

Marla traveled to Afghanistan and later to Iraq as part of Global Exchange's noble and necessary efforts to draw attention to civilian casualties of the U.S. invasions and occupations of those countries. Marla's work provoked an international outcry in 2002, after she exposed the fact that U.S. air strikes had killed hundreds of Afghan civilians during a six-month period when the major fighting was supposed to be done.

Traveling to Iraq after the U.S. invasion, Marla began the arduous work of seeking an accurate count of civilian casualties in that country. She went door-to-door in bomb-ravaged neighborhoods, collecting information and often serving as a shoulder to cry on.

When the United Nations and groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross began to abandon on-the-ground operations in Iraq because of the continuing violence, Marla stepped in. The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which she started, provided Iraqi families with information - and a smart, aggressive English-speaking ally - as they pursued claims for compensation from the U.S. military when they were injured and family members were killed.

That compensation was made possible, at least in part, because of Marla's work with U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who responded to the young woman's lobbying by inserting language into an appropriations bill to provide civilian aid worth $10 million in Afghanistan and $20 million in Iraq.

Leahy hailed Marla as "an exceptionally determined, energetic and brave young woman who has traveled to the front lines to focus attention on an issue that too often gets ignored," adding that "civilians bear the brunt of the suffering in wars today, but there is no policy to help them. Marla and her organization have helped put a human face on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by identifying the victims and their needs, and by lobbying for assistance."

After learning of Marla's death, Leahy observed that "most people in a lifetime would never accomplish what she has."

That is, undoubtedly, true. But Marla's motivation for going to Iraq was not a desire for accomplishment, nor adventure. It was a basic commitment that had its roots in her global justice campaigning. Despite her relative youth, Marla had for more than a decade been a pivotal player in the campaign against corporate globalization.

I got to know her first when she worked as a close aide and confidante of Medea Benjamin, the founding director of Global Exchange who was in on the ground floor of the organizing that helped to build the anti-sweatshop movement and that turned the energy from that movement into campaigns to expose and challenge the destructive policies of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

When Benjamin ran for the U.S. Senate from California in 2000, as a Green Party candidate, I had a good deal of contact with Marla. And I came to respect her as someone whose idealism had been channeled at a very young age into practical - and effective - activism. She was bold and courageous, but her motivations were exceptionally gentle. She wanted to make a better world, and she was certain that the way to achieve that goal was to give voice to the voiceless.

That sentiment is what took her to Iraq.

"I decided not to take a position on the war but to try to do the right humanitarian thing," Marla told the San Francisco Chronicle in December 2003. "No one can heal the wounds that have been inflicted; you just have to recognize that people have been harmed."

The recognition that people are being harmed, and that desire to do the right humanitarian thing, is at the heart of the global justice movement for which Marla Ruzicka lived and died.

John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times.

© 2005 Capital Times

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