ABC blog

By Carl Gershman, Published: December 19 on the Washington Post website

Vaclav Havel, who died on Sunday, will be remembered as a dissident playwright and Czechoslovakia’s first president following the Velvet Revolution of 1989. But he was more than a writer and a statesman. He was also a moral and intellectual leader of world stature and significance.

More so than any of the prominent figures from the period of anti-communist dissent, Havel used his position, voice and moral authority to advance present-day struggles for freedom. If he looked backward at all, it was only to find lessons from his own experience that might be useful for freedom-fighters today. Communicating those lessons, he once wrote to the Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya, was a way of repaying a debt to those who helped him in his own time of need.

He found many ways to repay that debt. In 1991, at a moment when he himself might have received the Nobel Peace Prize for leading the Velvet Revolution, he campaigned successfully for it to be awarded to Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi and remained a steadfast supporter of the Burmese democracy movement. He termed Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus “the disgrace of Europe” and extended moral and practical solidarity to the opposition there. He developed a deep connection with Paya’s Varela Project,which pressed for free elections and other basic rights in Cuba; and he established the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba, recruiting to it ex-presidents, members of parliament and distinguished writers from throughout Latin America and Europe. He co-authored a report applying the “responsibility to protect” doctrine to the totalitarian system in North Korea, And he led the successful international campaign to give the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, launching it with an open letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao demanding Liu’s release from prison. The letter was delivered on Jan. 6, 2010, the 33rd anniversary of the day Havel himself was arrested for delivering the democracy manifesto Charter 77 to the Prague Castle.

Havel performed these and other acts of solidarity with a distinct selflessness. The Iranian exile Ladan Boroumand recalls how Havel used an occasion when he was being honored at the Library of Congress in 2007 “to give visibility and support to obscure dissidents from around the world, men and women known to no one but the security forces in their respective countries.” Just 10 days ago in Prague, the Havel Library organized a similar forum for dissidents from Syria, Burma, Cuba and the Uyghur region of China.

In his great dissident essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel wrote of the threat that people “living in truth” pose to a system built on lies. He saw the communist system fall, as he expected it would. And in the decades that followed, when others settled for living in the half-truths of everyday politics, Havel found a way to continue living in truth. He is now gone, but he leaves a moral and intellectual legacy that is unsurpassed, and a model of how one can live in truth amid all the messiness and compromises of democratic politics. He was an inspiration and will remain so.

Link to story from Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vaclav-havels-legacy-to-humanity/2011/12/19/gIQAheW94O_story.html