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The ICAR Foundation in Romania mobilized public resources for the victims of human rights violations in order to get the State to take full responsibility for its actions by acknowledging and treating former political prisoners justly and humanely. Over nearly a decade, ICAR succeeded in getting the State to use public resources to assist in providing first the physical premises for torture treatment centers, and then the right to free medicines and insurance coverage for the specialized care and services that torture survivors required.

ICAR’s tactic is part of a larger strategy to get a nation to take responsibility for its past in order to build a better future. Many of the torturers from communist-era Romania have escaped with impunity, and some now occupy influential positions in society. The victims face a society where substantial forces would prefer to forget the past—and its victims—rather than learn from that past in order to build a deeper civil commitment to democracy and human rights.

This tactic involves a number of steps:

1.      Gaining the trust of the target group

2.      Identifying unmet needs

3.      Clarifying which government agencies or authorities to approach

4.      Strengthening networks and relationships

5.      Adapting to changes within the target group and government

For ICAR, the process began with an effort to gain the trust of former political prisoners.  This was accomplished by showing survivors that the organization understood that their needs were integrated, requiring medical, psychological, and societal efforts to overcome the damage inflicted by the past.   ICAR collaborated with the Romanian Association of Former Political Prisoners, AFDPR, an increasingly active group that comprised of 65,000 of an estimated 100,000 survivors of political persecution.

In choosing to develop rehabilitation services, it became clear that unmet needs included access to medical professionals committed to survivors, an appropriate physical space to provide services, financial support for services, and legislative support.  In order to meet these needs, ICAR targeted re-emerging leaders of historic parties, civil servants and state officials at city, municipal and state agencies, the General Medical Council, Ministry of Health, medical professionals and external laboratories and specialty clinics. To support the cause, ICAR also created alliances with other small civil society organizations, the media and the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) in Denmark.

Over time, ICAR succeeded in mobilizing substantial contributions from public Romanian resources to the specialized services for our target group. In human terms it has allowed the organization to provide continued quality medical care and rehabilitation to a substantial number of the hardest hit individuals among the former political prisoners in three Romanian cities.

ICAR’s experience is instructive for any group that is trying to get the state to take responsibility for the provision of a service, which a specific group has a right to receive. There may be many other areas where such pressure on and collaboration with the state could result in positive results, such as legal services or education.  Many campaigns could work for public sympathy and broad-based political support, while also mobilizing individual allies inside the system through informal channels and direct personal contact.

Use of this tactic requires an examination of the relationships and alliances needed for the issue and context being explored. It is important to thoroughly research the potential areas of public resources that may already be available or could be expanded, as well as developing new lines of public resources. This will provide a good starting point from which to build the relationships and alliances for the target population, but also gives direction for what systems, agencies, legal or legislative supports are necessary in order to move forward.  Adjustment and adaptation is critical in each area to keep pace with the new relationships, alliances and supports needed in order to keep building and strengthening the public resources being mobilized toward a particular issue or constituency.