The runaway
(by Cornel Nistorescu Thursday, 17 July 2003)

After all there is justice in this world. The Romanians' dread during the rule of Ceausescu, colonel Tudor Stanica, the deputy head of the penal investigation division of the communist-era militia general inspectorate, is now put under nation-wide search. Even if he is hiding in a hospital, at a friend's house or abroad, the dread of dreads is now on the run like a pickpocket or a petty criminal whom the police are pursuing. Colonel Tudor Stanica and colonel Mihail Creanga (former head of Rahova penitentiary) were sentenced to 22 years in prison in the case of the murder of engineer Gheorghe Ursu. The young people don't know much about Stanica and Creanga. It wouldn't do any harm to tell them something about them. Stanica was one of the zealous militiaman during the communist time, who, without needing any evidence, witnesses, laws, would have sent you to prison in a jiffy for a murmuring or for not observing the rigours of the communist system. The character was extremely tough. Whoever fell into his hands was a dead man. When Ceausescu wanted to apply a severe punishment, Tudor Stanica was called. He solved everything. And in the arrest in Rahova penitentiary the victims were taken over by a "beating machine" led by colonel Mihail Creanga. Tudor Stanica was also an investigator in the case of the protests of the Brasov workers in 1987 and in the case of those involved in the meat scandal, when for some piglets a few people were very close to death. Stanica also had links with the case of those incinerated in Timisoara, and after 1989 he became one of the cardboard billionaires of transition. The cruel colonel became a banker, took out money from the bankrupt Credit Bank, was involved in other scandals (such as S.AN.CA. - the crazy affair of Alexandru Raducan and Catalin Botezatu), in the system of relations and affairs in which were involved other former officers of Militia and Securitate communist-era political police, and after 1989, of the police and the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI). Tudor Stanica is one of the eloquent examples of the Romanian transition. After 1989, power and money were handled by the same structured remained after the fall of Ceausescu. The new power could not neutralize them and that is why it assimilated them, giving the entire political class, including today, a disputable component. From it flourished corruption and the political-financial mafia. Tudor Stanica, the dread of dreads, the one who still stood on his feet after the fall of communism in 1989, is now on the run. His sentence in the Gheorghe Ursu case is a tardy and well-deserved revenge of those were suffered because of him. It is also a moral lesson. I would have liked to believe that the final sentence in the Ursu case is also a slightest sign of rehabilitation of the justice system in Romania. I am sorry, but I cannot say that. First, because the Romanian justice did its best to postpone this sentence sine die. Only the firmness of the Ursu family, the foreign pressure and that put by the civil society have led to such a tardy sentence. Besides, it might have been issued out of the wish to show how impartial the justice apparently is. In the Ursu case, the justice did its duty, but it still doesn't enjoy the credibility it should have. For all those tormented, unfairly accused and for all those who feared Tudor Stanica, his running away not to be arrested is a revenge. An old torturer, with lots of money, but also haunted by a tormenting memory, runs away like a criminal to escape the coldness of handcuffs!