Vaclav Havel, dissident playwright and former Czech president, dies
Václav Havel, a Czech writer who was imprisoned by his country’s former communist rulers, only to become a symbol of freedom and his nation’s first president in the post-communist era, died Sunday morning at his weekened home in the Czech Republic, the Associated Press reports. He was 75.
The death was announced by his assistant, Sabina Tancecova, the Associated Press reports.
Mr. Havel was a playwright by profession and a political activist by avocation. The two activities were complementary and each served to gain him a leading place among the dissidents of Eastern Europe who helped bring down the communist empire. His words and deeds resonated far beyond the borders of the former Czechoslovakia, and he was widely recognized for his struggles in behalf of democracy and human dignity.
After being unanimously elected president of Czechoslovakia by the newly free country’s parliament in December 1989, Mr. Havel set the tone of the new era in a speech on Jan. 1, 1990, his first day in office. Communism, he said, was “a monstrous, ramshackle, stinking machine” whose worst legacy was not economic failure but a “spoiled moral environment.”
“We have become morally ill because we are used to saying one thing and thinking another,” he said. “We have learned not to believe in anything, not to care about each other… . Love, friendship, mercy, humility, or forgiveness have lost their depths and dimension… . They represent some sort of psychological curiosity, or they appear as long-lost wanderers from faraway times.