Tributes pour in for Václav Havel, the man who led Velvet Revolution

VÁCLAV HAVEL, the dissident playwright who was jailed by Communists and then went on to become Czech president and a symbol of peace and freedom after leading the bloodless “Velvet Revolution”, died yesterday, aged 75.

The former chain smoker, who survived several operations for lung cancer and a burst intestine in the late 1990s that left him frail for the rest of his life, died after a long respiratory illness. He was with his wife Dagmar and a nun who had cared for him at his country home in Hradecek, north of Prague.

“Today Václav Havel has left us,” his secretary, Sabina Tancevova, said in a statement.

Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt said: “Václav Havel was one of the greatest Europeans of our age. His voice for freedom paved the way for a Europe whole and free.”

The diminutive playwright who invited the Rolling Stones to medieval Prague Castle, took Bill Clinton to a Prague jazz club and was a friend of the Dalai Lama, rose to fame after facing down Prague’s Communist regime over its abuses.

His dissident plays were banned for two decades and he was thrown into prison several times after launching Charter 77, a manifesto demanding the Communist government adhere to international standards for human rights.

Just six months after completing his last jail sentence, he led hundreds of thousands of protesters in Prague’s streets in a peaceful uprising in November 1989 that ended Soviet-backed rule. Just over a month later, he was installed as president in Prague Castle.

“I am extremely moved,” an emotional prime minister Petr Necas told Czech Television when told of Havel’s death.

“He was a symbol and the face of our republic, and he is one of the most prominent figures of the politics of the last and the start of this century. His departure is a huge loss.”

Mr Havel became a guarantee of peaceful transition to democracy and allowed the small country of ten million to punch well above its weight in international politics.

“Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred” was Mr Havel’s slogan that Czechs remember from the Velvet Revolution days. In later years, that slogan was often quoted in sarcasm as Czechs’ initial enthusiasm towards free market democracy collided with the reality of economic reforms and corrupt politics.

“He did not want to be a president,” said Petruska Sustrova, a prominent Czech dissident and one of the first to sign Charter 77. “Ideally, he wanted to sit in a pub and reconcile quarrels. He was not very keen to enter politics, he thought it would cut him off from the normal world.”

His absurdist dramas, whose characters often struggled to communicate in the empty language of Communist-era rhetoric, took to the stage in the 1960s, a more liberal era crushed by Soviet tanks in 1968.

Havel’s plays then disappeared in censors’ vaults, and the author was forced into menial jobs such as rolling beer barrels.

“He was a great and well- deserving man and will be greatly missed. May he rest in peace,” said Polish dissident leader Lech Walesa.