Vaclav Havel, Czech leader and writer, dies at 75 | INFJ Forum

Vaclav Havel, Czech leader and writer, dies at 75

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[h=1]Vaclav Havel, Czech
leader and writer, dies at 75[/h]


Posted: 12/19/2011 01:00:00 AM
MST
Updated: 12/19/2011 02:58:41 AM MST​
By Dan Bilefsky and Jane
Perlez

The New York Times









Vaclav Havel​. (AP file photo)




Vaclav Havel, the writer and dissident whose eloquent dissections of
Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin
Wall and swept Havel himself into power, died Sunday. He was 75.

His assistant, Sabina Tancevova, said Havel died at his country house in
northern Bohemia.

A Czech Embassy spokesman in Paris, Michal Dvorak, said in a statement that
Havel, a heavy smoker for decades who almost died during surgery for lung cancer
in 1996, had suffered severe respiratory ailments since last spring.

A shy yet resilient, unfailingly polite but dogged man who articulated the
power of the powerless, Havel spent five years in and out of Communist prisons,
lived for two decades under secret-police surveillance and endured the
suppression of his plays and essays.

His moral authority and his moving use of the Czech language cast him as a
dominant figure during Prague street demonstrations in 1989 and as the chief
behind- the-scenes negotiator who brought about the peaceful transfer of power
known as the Velvet Revolution, a revolt so smooth that it took just weeks to
complete, without a single bullet fired.

He was chosen as democratic Czechoslovakia's first president,
 
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