"The state and the mafia"
By Dag Daniš
The action drama from Polomka had a happy end over the weekend. The three mafia hitmen who murdered businessman Ján Kubašiak are no longer on the run, but behind bars. The police even have a hot lead on the man who ordered the hit - it's one of Kubašiak's colleagues from the oil fraud case [in which 84 people were jailed in 2004].
Despite this good news, we cannot regard the police as the winners in this case. Their success concealed an even graver failure.
For starters, the fugitives managed to escape or bamboozle the police on three separate occasions. Second, Robert Červeňan, the first to be apprehended, gave himself up to the police. Third, Robert Petluš and Juraj Roszík made an elementary mistake in getting their families involved. And fourth, these mafia criminals were not typical gangsters, but cops - two former and one current.
This case fully shows that the police are connected with the mafia. It also shows how weak the prosecutor's office, the courts and the state itself are. The police detained Kubašiak and his cohorts from the oil gang two years ago, but most of them were released suspiciously promptly by the courts. The police could only smile bitterly, and consider quitting for less absurd work.
The state is simply failing in the security area. It doesn't have a unified police on fighting crime in which the police, prosecutors and courts would all be pulling together against the bad guys.
But in our society, which is infected with weak liberalism and "freedoms", it is not possible to come up with a different policy. For years the call has gone out for greater civil liberties and freedoms and for a weaker state, which has undercut the police and led to the "independence" of prosecutors and courts from any kind of supervision. The other side of the coin - duty, order and law - has been forgotten, just as it has been forgotten that you can't have both a weak state and a weak mafia at the same time.
