A Tribute to Vaclav Havel - A Leader Fighting Against Communist Oppression

Two deaths were announced yesterday,  one of a fighter against Communist oppression and that of a Communist leader that starved his people.  Vaclav Havel, a dissident writer, who never wanted to be a politician, was pushed into politics by his activism against communist oppression.  He lead a peaceful revolution that toppled communism in the former Czechoslovakia.  One of his disappointments was that the country he loved split into two.

As the first democratically elected President 1989 for his country, after leading the peaceful demonstration against communist oppression, Havel is credited with laying the ground work for the Czech Republic's entry into the European Union.  He was President when the Czech Republic entered NATO in 1999.

Biography of Vaclav Havel

A spokeswoman said Havel died in his sleep early Sunday at his weekend house in the northern Czech Republic with his wife and a nun at his side. A former chain smoker, he had a history of chronic respiratory problems that physicians traced back to his Cold War years in communist prisons.

Havel was his country's first democratically-elected president after the 1989 non-violent "Velvet Revolution" that ended four decades of communist repression. On taking office, he oversaw Czechoslovakia's transition to a free-market economy and democracy, as well as its peaceful 1993 breakup into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Havel left office in 2003, just months before the two countries joined the European Union. He was credited with laying the groundwork that brought the Czech Republic into the 27-nation bloc, and was president when the republic joined NATO in 1999. But he said his proudest presidential achievement was the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact - the Moscow-led military alliance that lasted until 1991.

Havel first rose to prominence after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed the "Prague Spring" reforms of Alexander Dubcek and other liberally-minded communists in the former Czechoslovakia. His plays were then banned by hardliners installed by Moscow who sought to crush any traces of those reforms.

However, he continued to write a series of underground essays widely seen as some of the most damning critiques of what communism did to society and the individual in post-World War II Europe. War on Terror News