[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 200 (Thursday, December 22, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10079-S10080]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              RECOGNIZING CENTER FOR CIVILIANS IN CONFLICT

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, 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.
  While no one could replace Marla's vivaciousness and passion for the 
cause of protecting civilians in war, CIVIC survived that terrible loss 
and has since evolved into a global advocacy organization devoted to 
protecting civilians who increasingly bear the brunt of armed 
conflicts. Ukraine is a horrifying example that is on the front pages 
every day, but there are many others--in South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and 
Burma to name a few.
  In August, a year after the disastrous U.S. missile strike that 
killed a whole family in Kabul after multiple egregious intelligence 
failures, Secretary of Defense Austin released the Pentagon's own 
Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan. If fully 
implemented, it could significantly improve the way the Pentagon 
addresses civilian harm. CIVIC and other advocacy organizations have 
been calling for such reforms, as have I since as far back as when 
Marla was still alive. Congress even enacted legislation that specified 
procedures for evaluating claims and making ex gratia payments to 
eligible civilian victims, but the Pentagon ignored them. They also 
failed to utilize millions of dollars appropriated by Congress for this 
purpose, despite the obvious needs in Syria and elsewhere. So I welcome 
this long overdue step, but as currently envisioned, the action plan is 
prospective and does not contemplate investigations of past incidents 
of civilian casualties or assistance for those victims. That is wrong. 
It should provide for victims of past incidents, at least those for 
which credible information has already been collected, and I urge the

[[Page S10080]]

Secretary of Defense to revisit this question.
  The importance of minimizing harm to civilians in conflict cannot be 
overstated. For far too long, senior officials of United States and 
other countries' armed forces spoke little about civilian casualties, 
treating them as regrettable collateral damage that is inevitable in 
warfare. In fact, if the laws of war are to be taken seriously, they 
require effective procedures and rigorous enforcement. CIVIC's mission, 
20 years after Marla Ruzicka compelled us to pay attention, is as 
relevant today as it was then, to ensure that everything is done that 
can and should be done to protect civilians in conflict, and to assist 
those who are harmed. By doing so we reaffirm our respect for human 
life and human dignity that people around the world expect of us, we 
mitigate anger and resentment within local populations whose support we 
need, and we enhance the reputation and mission of our own Armed 
Forces.

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