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    December 18, 2011

Vaclav Havel Dies at Age 75

   VOA News
   Former President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel answers questions
   about anti-government protests in Egypt, North Africa and the Middle
   East, (File).
   Photo: AP
   Former President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel answers questions
   about anti-government protests in Egypt, North Africa and the Middle
   East, (File).

   Former Czech President Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who led
   the peaceful revolution that toppled communism in the former
   Czechoslovakia, has died. He was 75.
   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.

   Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

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