This very sad news has just been reported:
Poet, playwright, dissident, and former President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel has died at age 75 after a long battle with lung disease. Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera (sorry, in Italian) reminds us of his critical role in the revolution of 1989 and that he was the first President of the post-Communist republic.
I'll add more information once obituaries begin to appear.
A very sad day.
Edited at 12:49 CET:
CNN has just published a short obit.
NYT has this Reuters news flash.
Edited at 14:41 CET:
The NYT now has this AP obit up.
In a time of world protest, let's remember Havel's essential role in overturning totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia, from the AP article linked above:
The events of August 1988 — the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion — first suggested that Mr. Havel and his friends might one day replace the faceless apparatchiks who jailed them.
Thousands of mostly young people marched through central Prague, yelling his name and that of the playwright’s hero, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher who was Czechoslovakia’s first president after it was founded in 1918.
Mr. Havel’s arrest in January 1989 at another street protest and his subsequent trial generated anger at home and abroad. Pressure for change was so strong that the communists released him again in May.
That fall, communism began to collapse across Eastern Europe, and in November the Berlin Wall fell. Eight days later, communist police brutally broke up a demonstration by thousands of Prague students.
It was the signal that Mr. Havel and his country had awaited. Within 48 hours, a broad new opposition movement was founded, and a day later, hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks took to the streets.
