On Monday, our coterie of student journalists visited the office of Vaclav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first and former president of the Czech Republic. Thanks to our hosts, Oldrich Cerny and the Prague Security Studies Institute, we spoke with Havel's long-time assistant in his modest offices in downtown Prague. His story is an interesting, compelling, and inspiring one that has pretty much defined the last two decades of Czech politics and life.
Most people know Havel as the leader of the so-called Velvet Revolution. I use the term "so-called" like many of the people I have met because it indicates the nature of the Czech outlook on the 1989 event. First off, the term was first used by a French journalist to describe the relatively peaceful nature of the revolt and to make reference to one of Havel's favorite bands, the Velvet Underground. Also, Czechs here take the term "revolution" with a grain of salt, particularly in the rather cynical way they view the political developments in the Czech Republic since 1989.
Anyway, Havel led this revolution, became the president of Czechoslovakia, and then became the president of the Czech Republic after the split in 1993 (annoyingly called the Velvet Divorce; seriously, journalists can be so unoriginal). Before this political career, though, Havel was a dramatist, a vocation that evolved into his becoming a dissident in the communist regime. His plays were not exactly music to the Communists' ears, and he was harassed and imprisoned multiple times for his politically-charged plays and his other political activism that stressed human rights and freedom from an oppressive regime.
When Havel left the presidency in 2003, he was, in the words of Oldrich Cerny, not viewed as a hero in his own country. His political enemy, former prime minister and current president Vaclav Klaus, pretty much created a political environment where Havel is viewed as one side of a two-sided debate within the Czech Republic. This greatly contrasts with his global reputation as a freedom fighter for the Czech people and human rights. For the Czechs, however, Havel's reputation is one of political partisan.
This is an interesting aspect of the Czech people, one that many of the experts I've met with this week have echoed. The Czechs, in many instances, easily forget recent history. Thus, the man who led the Czechoslovakian dissident movement throughout the 1980s that culminated in the toppling of what was perceived as a solidly Communist country, the man who presided over the Czech Republic for its first ten years, is not revered as the Czech Gandhi or Mandela, two men compared with Havel by Bill Clinton.
Having heard about the man from close associates this week, Havel himself would certainly rejected this comparison, and it does seem a little vaulted. Nevertheless, Havel was one of the most important heroes of the Cold War, and he certainly belongs in the same pantheon as Thomas Masaryk as an esteemed leader of the Czech people.
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