ASSOCIATED PRESS | 12/18/11 8:10 AM EST
Vaclav Havel dies at 75
PRAGUE - Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who wove theater into
politics to peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia and become a hero
of the epic struggle that ended the Cold War, has died. He was 75.
Havel died Sunday morning at his weekend house in the northern Czech
Republic, his assistant Sabina Tancecova said.
Havel was his country’s first democratically elected president after the
nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” that ended four decades of repression by a
regime he ridiculed as “Absurdistan.”
As president, he oversaw the country’s bumpy transition to democracy
and a free-market economy, as well its peaceful 1993 breakup into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Even out of office, the diminutive Czech remained a world figure. He
was part of the “new Europe” - in the coinage of then-U.S. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld - of ex-communist countries that stood up for the United States
when the democracies of “old Europe” opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion.
A former chain-smoker, Havel had a history of chronic respiratory
problems dating back to his years in communist jails.
Havel left office in 2003, 10 years after Czechoslovakia broke up and just
months before both nations joined the European Union. He was credited with
laying the groundwork that brought his Czech Republic into the 27-nation
bloc, and was president when it joined NATO in 1999.
Shy and bookish, with wispy mustache and unkempt hair, Havel came to symbolize the power of the people to
peacefully overcome totalitarian rule.
“Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred,” Havel
famously said. It became his revolutionary motto which he said he always strove
to live by.
Havel was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and
collected dozens of other accolades worldwide for his efforts as a global
ambassador of conscience, defended the downtrodden from Darfur to Myanmar.
Among his many honors were Sweden’s
prestigious Olof Palme Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest
U.S.
civilian award, bestowed on him by President George W. Bush for being “one of
liberty’s great heroes.”
An avowed peacenik whose heroes included rockers such as Frank Zappa,
he never quite shed his flower-child past and often signed his name with a
small heart as a flourish.
In an October 2008 interview with The Associated Press, Havel rebuked Russia for invading Georgia
two months earlier, and warned EU leaders against appeasing Moscow.
“We should not turn a blind eye … It’s a big test for the West,” he
said.
Havel also said he saw the global economic crisis as a warning not to
abandon basic human values in the scramble to prosper.
“It’s a warning against the idea that we understand the world, that we
know how everything works,” he told the AP in his office in Prague. The cramped work space was packed
with his books, plays and rock memorabilia.
Havel first made a name for himself after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion
that crushed the Prague Spring reforms of Alexander Dubcek and other liberally
minded communists in what was then Czechoslovakia.
Havel’s plays were banned as hard-liners installed by Moscow snuffed out every whiff of rebellion.
But he continued to write, producing a series of underground essays that stand
with the work of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov as the most incisive and eloquent
analyses of what communism did to society and the individual.
One of his best-known essays, “The Power and the Powerless” written in
1978, borrowed slyly from the immortal opening line of the mid-19th century
Communist Manifesto, writing: “A specter is haunting eastern Europe: the
specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’”
In the essay, he dissected what he called the “dictatorship of ritual”
- the ossified Soviet bloc system under Leonid Brezhnev - and imagined what
happens when an ordinary greengrocer stops displaying communist slogans and
begins “living in truth,” rediscovering “his suppressed identity and dignity.”
Havel knew that suppression firsthand.
Born Oct. 5, 1936, in Prague, the child of a wealthy family which lost
extensive property to communist nationalization in 1948, Havel was denied a
formal education, eventually earning a degree at night school and starting out
in theater as a stagehand.
His political activism began in earnest in January 1977, when he
co-authored the human rights manifesto Charter 77, and the cause drew widening
attention in the West.
Havel was detained countless times and spent four years in communist jails.
His letters from prison to his wife became one of his best-known works.
“Letters to Olga” blended deep philosophy with a stream of stern advice to the
spouse he saw as his mentor and best friend, and who tolerated his reputed
philandering and other foibles.
The events of August 1988 - the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion -
first suggested that Havel and his friends might one day replace the faceless
apparatchiks who jailed them.
Thousands of mostly young people marched through central Prague, yelling Havel’s name and that of the playwright’s
hero, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher who was Czechoslovakia’s
first president after it was founded in 1918.
Havel’s arrest in January 1989 at another street protest and his subsequent
trial generated anger at home and abroad. Pressure for change was so strong
that the communists released him again in May.
That fall, communism began to collapse across Eastern Europe, and in November
the Berlin
Wall fell. Eight days later, communist police brutally broke up a demonstration
by thousands of Prague
students.
It was the signal that Havel and his
country had awaited. Within 48 hours, a broad new opposition movement was
founded, and a day later, hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks took to
the streets.
In three heady weeks, communist rule was broken. Mick Jagger and the
Rolling Stones arrived just as the Soviet army was leaving. Posters in Prague proclaimed: “The
tanks are rolling out - the Stones are rolling in.”
On Dec. 29, 1989, Havel was elected Czechoslovakia’s president by the
country’s still-communist parliament. Three days later, he told the nation in a
televised New Year’s address: “Out of gifted and sovereign people, the regime
made us little screws in a monstrously big, rattling and stinking machine.”
Although he continued to be regarded a moral voice as he decried the
shortcomings of his society under democracy, he eventually bent to the dictates
of convention and power. His watchwords - “what the heart thinks, the tongue
speaks” - had to be modified for day-to-day politics. «
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Václav_Havel
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