For most Romanians, 1990 was the year in which their existence took a crucial turn. The regime in which they had been born, brought up, educated and formed as professionals came to an end. Even if, immediately after the 22nd of December 1989, each of us kept on going to the same workplace or to the same school and kept interacting with the same people, something completely new and unusual had appeared in our lives: the freedom to express our opinions, critical or not, and to influence the way have an opinion on how our country should be administered.
On the other hand, 1990 was the year in which we proved to ourselves that we did not know what to do with our freshly earned freedom. Politics or, to be more precise, the opinions each of us had on politics, made some consider their friends or even their closest relatives as the worst enemies. We were not used to dealing with the fact that people having opinions different from ours were not necessarily communists, right-wing legionnaires, informers of the secret police, agents on the payroll of the foreign secret services or belonging to foreign groups of interests, or plain criminals. Obviously, back in those days, there were many who knew how to take advantage of the fact that we were not and could not be easily adjusted to the rules of the new democratic game. Thus, Romania became famous all around the world (in a negative way, unfortunately) because of those events that remained in our memory as: "January 28-29", "February 18", "March 20 - Targu-Mures", "The Mineriada of June 13-15".
A number of individuals, proving clear vision and especially desire to do something so that people would turn to dialogue as means of expressing conflicting ideas started forming groups, some of them becoming in a short time solid organizations and assuming the mission of building a democratic Romanian society.
Two of these groups were the starting point in the creation of a national organization that was to be named Asociatia Pro Democratia (Pro Democracy Association - APD). We here refer to a group of intellectuals from Brasov who had already given an official legal status to their association and had founded a dialogue group called "The Opinion" and about a group of students from Bucharest. It is our moral duty to mention that these two groups did not meet accidentally but rather at the suggestion of some representatives of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs who, subsequent to a series of visits to Romania, had met both groups. Those who were to become the main international partners of APD in the first years of its existence noticed that the two groups they had just met had similar objectives. This fact made them suggest that the two groups should join their forces and try to build a strong national civic organization.