On the recordDecember 22, 2022
in 2023 the Center for Civilians in Conflict will celebrate its 20th anniversary. This is a significant milestone, as I vividly recall when CIVIC, originally named the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, was created by Marla Ruzicka. When I first met Marla she was a 26-year-old dynamo from Lakeport, CA, who had gone to Afghanistan on her own to raise awareness about civilian casualties of U.S. military operations. Like many of us, she had read reports of repeated incidents of U.S. bombs missing their targets and wiping out whole neighborhoods, of innocent people being shot at checkpoints, and other deaths and injuries of civilians. Marla not only read about those tragic incidents; she became a one-woman campaign with a laptop who, within a few months of arriving in Kabul, was quoted in the New York Times and other publications, calling on the U.S. to do more to protect civilians and assist those who were harmed. As a result of her efforts, Congress created funds for both Afghanistan and Iraq, administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development, to provide such assistance, the latter fund named for Marla after she was killed, herself an innocent victim of war, in a car bombing in Baghdad on April 16, 2005.…
