Vaclav Havel

From behind the Iron Curtain to the Velvet Revolution, a genuine leader...

From behind the walls of a totalitarian state, his words, his writings, his very life helped fan the flames of a cultural revolution. For half a century the people of Czechoslovakia languished beneath the thumb of Nazi Germany and then behind the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union. When the light of freedom finally broke through in 1989, the people chose V�clav Havel -- dissident playwrite and human rights leader -- to carry them into their new dawn.

"I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you," President Havel told his countrymen on January 1, 1990. The time had come, he said, to take responsibility. As a world leader speaking from a burgeoning Czech Republic, Havel has set his modernist eyes on his global community. Concerned with such crisis as cultural divides, environmental degradation and nuclear proliferation, this one-time stagehand hopes to direct a healing of the human spirit. "It cannot suffice to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions," he told world leaders assembled in Prague Castle for the FORUM 2000 conference. "It is necessary to understand differently and more perfectly the true purpose of our existence on this Earth and of our deeds.... In short: it appears to me that it would be better to start from the head rather than the tail," he explained. A tall order indeed. For V�clav Havel, it seems, convincing communist rulers to step aside may have only been his opening act.

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