Silence falls as Czechs bid farewell to Václav Havel

CZECHS and world leaders paid emotional tribute to Václav Havel at his funeral yesterday, ending a week of public grief over the death of the dissident playwright who led the 1989 revolution that toppled four decades of communist rule.

Bells tolled from churches while a siren brought the country to a standstill in a minute of silence for the nation’s first democratically-elected president after the Velvet Revolution.

Mr Havel’s wife Dagmar, family members, friends and leaders from dozens of countries gathered at the towering, gothic St Vitus Cathedral, which overlooks Prague.

Prime Minister David Cameron, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy were among some 1,000 mourners who bowed their heads in front of the coffin draped in the Czech colours.

Czech president Václav Klaus, who was Mr Havel’s political arch rival, and two friends – foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg and former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright – paid tribute to Mr Havel at the cathedral, which has not witnessed a state funeral since 1875.

“We will terribly miss him but we will never, ever forget him,” said Mrs Albright, who is of Czech origin.

In a message read at the funeral by the Vatican’s former diplomatic representative in Prague, Pope Benedict XVI praised Mr Havel.

“Remembering how courageously Mr Havel defended human rights at a time when these were systematically denied to the people of your country, and paying tribute to his visionary leadership in forging a new democratic polity after the fall of the previous regime, I give thanks to God for the freedom that the people of the Czech Republic now enjoy,” he said.

At the end of the ceremony, 21 cannon salvos were fired when the Czech anthem was played.

People were applauding when Mr Havel’s coffin was then carried by a military honour guard through the cathedral’s Golden Gate to Prague’s Strasnice crematorium for a private family funeral.

The urn with Mr Havel’s ashes will be buried at his family’s plot at the city’s Vinohrady cemetery alongside his first wife, Olga, who died in 1996.

Mr Havel, whose final term in office ended in 2003, died in his sleep on Sunday. The 75-year-old former chain-smoker had a history of chronic respiratory problems dating to his time in prison.

Since his death, Czechs have gathered spontaneously to lay flowers and light candles at key historic sites such as the monument to the 1989 Velvet Revolution in downtown Prague, and at Wenceslas Square, where Mr Havel once spoke before hundreds of thousands of people to express outrage at the repressive communist regime.

Similar scenes of remembrance played out across the country – in a show of emotion not seen since the 1937 funeral of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s first president after the nation was founded in 1918.