Elizabeth Rubin
Contributing Writer
The New York Times Magazine

Citation
Elizabeth Rubin's articles about Iraq and Saudi Arabia are both hopeful and discouraging. Hopeful in that she tells the stories of two people trying to do good-a feisty young lawyer from Oklahoma working to advance human rights in Iraq and a former radical Islamist in Saudi Arabia trying to encourage critical thinking and democracy in that country. Discouraging in that she chronicles the cultural obstacles that face both protagonists-obstacles so difficult that, in the case of the Oklahoma lawyer, they result in her death. With her eye for detail and knack for convincing people to open up to her, Rubin provides us with insights into the way Iraqis and Saudis think about themselves and the West. Readers come away from her stories with a much richer sense of two cultures that Americans ignore at their own peril.

Excerpt
Fern Holland's War
September 19, 2004
Babil, home of ancient Babylonia, is often called "the white flower." The Euphrates lolls through Babil, watering willows, eucalyptus and acres of date palms. The people in Hilla, Babil's capital, for the most part welcomed coalition troops as liberators. A mostly Shiite community, Hilla had lost thousands of men during the Iran-Iraq war and the disastrous, American-inspired 1991 uprising against Saddam. In the spring of 2003, after the Baathists were overthrown, the people of Hilla dug up mass graves to look for their relatives. I was traveling there at the time and, in some of the bleakest stretches of desert, watched men praying, "God is the only god," as they heaved remains from the heavy earth: shirts crumpled around skeletons, toe bones tucked in sandals, leg bones clanking like gourds. A man in a dishdasha, drenched in sweat, was searching for his wife among neatly lined-up piles in white shrouds. Inside one he found a black abaya crumpled as if the woman had melted. There was no jewelry, no shoes, just a mulch of henna-colored bones, hair and nails. He had no way of knowing who she was, but he broke down anyway. I looked at my interpreter, a Kurd from Halabja, whom I'd been traveling with since before the war began, and I could see as we drifted slowly from pit to pit that he just wanted to sink and die. One of the men shadowing a grave pointed inside. "This is America," he said. "They lie here because of America. I'm sorry if you are American, but tell your countrymen that's why they are here. The father Bush betrayed us and brought Saddam back, and look what he did."
It was graves like these that convinced [Fern] Holland she had to stay in Iraq. As Stephen Rodolf, her Tulsa lawyer friend, recalled the story: "I was telling Fern about the protest in the U.S. against our being there, and the fact that the lack of W.M.D.'s was invalidating everything we went in for. She said: 'I don't know anything about W.M.D. But I can tell you this countryside is littered with the graves of men, women and children murdered by this regime.' "She was collecting testimony for future war-crimes trials from Shiite survivors of Saddam's massacres -- hair-raising tales of escape, of being buried alive beneath the dead, of identities hidden for 12 years until Saddam's fall. Some of these survivors formed the human rights associations that sprouted up across the south that spring.

Biography
Elizabeth Rubin started her career reviewing theater at the Vineyard Gazette on Martha's Vineyard, before moving to The Forward as deputy cultural editor. In 1994 she went to Sarajevo for a six-week stint which lasted nearly two years. Her reportage in Harper's about private armies, diamond wars, and state collapse in Sierra Leone was a National Magazine Award finalist and earned an Overseas Press Club citation for excellence. At The New Yorker, she won the Livingston Award for International Reporting for her story about a Ugandan rebel army of kidnapped children. After 9/11, she covered the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for The New Republic and wrote about Russians, Chechens, Saudis, Iraqis, Iranians, and Americans abroad for The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. A 2004-2005 Nieman Fellow, she was raised in Larchmont, N.Y. and earned a B.A. at Columbia University and an M.Phil. at Oxford.