Comment du Jour

Vaclav Havel
1936-2011

The Passing of a Renaissance Man

Author, Playwright, and former President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel has died at age 75. Havel whose career as literary figure and a political dissident in communist Czechoslovakia, presided over the transformation of the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’s transition into a sovereign democracy and a free market economy.

His role as a dissident spanned the darkest decades of the old socialist regime. In 1977, he and fellow dissidents supported the “Charter 77” human rights manifesto. During the communist regime, his works and plays were banned and Havel himself was regularly harassed by the security police.

Without question, Havel’s greatest play was the political drama of the Velvet Revolution, the massive people-power protests which rocked Prague the capital and other centers and which finally broke the grip of the ruling communists.

When the Soviet-backed regime collapsed in these epic events of 1989, Havel became President of Czechoslovakia and held the title with a brief interruption until 2003

During President Havel's tenure, the Czech Republic "rejoined history," resumed its place in Central Europe as a prosperous country, and was admitted into the European Union (EU) and NATO.


According to a BBC correspondent,“Within hours of the announcement of his death people began lighting candles and laying flowers at the statue of St. Wenceslas on Wenceslas Square, where Havel addressed huge crowds of demonstrators in November 1989.”