18/12/2013
Alejandro Arratia is political analyst
(Photo: Alan Pajer. http://www.democracyandsecurity.org/index.htm)
Václav Havel's life (1936-2011) is that of an outstanding humanist who was president of his country without denying the demonstration of sound ethical principles in his intellectual production and dissident militancy. An important playwright and writer, he went down in history for his role in the liberation and architecture of the new Czechoslovakia. When the Soviet empire–morally and economically diminished–began crumbling before the eyes of a rejoiced democratic-liberal West, the small Czech Republic and Slovakia helped bury it with an exemplary peaceful revolution supported by reason and love of freedom.
Havel left us on December 18, 2011. He left dissatisfied with the results of his actions in government. The brave citizen, armed with velvet cannons, would now be 77 years old. He finished his school education in 1951, but was denied the right to continue studying in college because he came from a "bourgeois" family. With no job whatsoever, his plays banned and his writings censored, he supported Alexander Dubcek in 1968 in the Prague Spring, an uprising crushed by the Soviet tanks. He was put in jail in 1970 for The Two Thousand Words Manifesto, and he was again imprisoned in 1979 for Charter 77,which demanded respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Havel, thinker, critical and sceptical of all dogmas, diametrically opposed to communism, lived convinced that only a system with moral values was the way to freedom. That "rebel" assumed the maximum responsibility of the nation forced by circumstances. Constantly persecuted and harassed, leader of the Civic Forum at the time when the perestroika was establishing itself in the USSR, he led the Velvet Revolution. The first president of Czechoslovakia (1989), he was also president of the Czech Republic in 1993, once Slovakia and the Czech Republic were separated; he was re-elected in 1998 and resigned (2003) for health reasons.
The division that with great affection and concern was made by his admirers and scholars between the writer-playwright and the civil-political-statesman hero, seems irrelevant. He doesn't unfold, there are not several characters in that scene from between centuries which swept dictatorships and built free societies. At 74 he made his debut as a film director with 'Leaving', a play premiered in May 2008 and brought to the big screen in 2011; a tragic testament of human excesses and the disappointment brought by the evolution of his country after 20 years of democratic governments.
Havel–from the streets of Prague, or at the head of state–handed part of his art-making and followed the lessons of live rebellion. A leader capable of the boldest decisions, he acted with full awareness of the moment that destiny had assigned to him. Far from the Nihilism generating resignation and servitude, a creator in trepidation of events, he rose in political action which he recognised as a curious field of human activity. A hero of the twentieth century who fused his life with moral principles, democracy and art.