捷克劇作家哈維1989年12月當選總統，於總統府「布拉格堡」的陽台上，高舉著勝利手勢。
美聯社
來過台灣的捷克前總統哈維，18日在他位於捷克北部的周末別墅中辭世，享年75歲。哈維過世舉世同悼，德國首相梅克爾稱他是「偉大的歐洲人」，為自由奮鬥不懈；捷克總統克勞斯讚美他是「捷克新時代的象徵人物」。
哈維因長期患病產生的併發症去世。辭世時，妻子妲歌瑪˙薇絲柯諾娃隨侍在側。哈維菸癮很大，1970年代因反共數度入獄時，即有呼吸道問題。2009年1月12日哈維因不明的發炎住院，動過咽喉手術後，一直有呼吸困難毛病。
哈維集劇作家、文學家、政治家、導演等身分於一身。1977年，哈維因參與捷克人權宣言「77憲章」的發起，成為國際知名的異議劇作家。
1989年，哈維將劇場搬上政治舞台，以「愛與真理終將戰勝謊言與仇恨」的口號，發動和平的「絲絨革命」（又稱天鵝絨革命），推翻了統治40年的捷克斯洛伐克共產黨，成為終結冷戰的英雄人物。捷克總理尼卡斯18日讚美哈維是1989年革命的象徵人物。
哈維同時是捷克第一位民選總統，在他任內，捷克走出顛簸，變身成民主國度與自由市場經濟體，以及在1993年讓捷克斯洛伐克和平分裂成捷克與斯洛伐克兩國。
哈維於1989至1992年擔任捷克斯洛伐克總統，1993至2003年繼續擔任捷克總統。
哈維的名言包括「文學高於政治，人權高於主權」，是位極其平民化的總統。2003年卸任後仍受世人看重。美國前國防部長倫斯斐稱他是東歐前共產國家組合而成的「新歐洲」的一部分，2003年「舊歐洲」反對美國揮軍伊拉克，「新歐洲」卻力挺美國。
德國外長威特維爾稱讚哈維是「捷克革命之魂」，「歐洲統一的開拓者」；瑞典外長畢爾特稱哈維是「我們時代最偉大的歐洲人之一。他的自由吶喊，為歐洲的統一與自由預鋪道路」。
哈維 從劇作家、囚犯到總統
【中央社╱布拉格18日綜合外電報導】 2011.12.19 04:09 am
即使哈維身兼劇作家、反共偶像、總統、最近還當上電影導演，取得極高的成就，但他終其一生維持與其瘦弱體型相稱的謙遜與羞怯。
哈維數月前接受雜誌訪問時說：「我的確時常展開相當冒險的計畫，雖然我不是個冒險家。」訪問2月刊出，10個月後哈維今天辭世，享年75歲。
哈維是荒謬劇場（The Theatre of the Absurd）傳統中不追隨主流的劇作家，同時身兼搖滾迷與知識分子。他是天鵝絨革命（Velvet Revolution）的象徵，此革命於1989年12月和平終結了捷克斯洛伐克（Czechoslovakia）共黨政權。
他回憶道，這些事件使他成為「捷克斯洛伐克反對派明星」，也為他在全世界歷史書中贏得一席之地。
他寫道：「人們視我為這麼一號人物，領導祖國公民未經歷痛苦，就漂亮擊敗擁有無比強大權力機器者。」
共產主義垮台後，用他自己的話來說，他在一夕之間被拱上國家元首這個職位─僅僅從共黨監獄中釋放出來幾個月後。
雖然哈維在共產黨之後，1989到1992年擔任捷克斯洛伐克總統，然後1993到2003年擔任捷克共和國總統，但他拒斥跟權力有關的一切虛矯。
他寫道：「有些人說，我為總統職位而戰，這是胡扯。我不曾為了任何東西而戰。」
哈維1936年10月5日生於布拉格，他家擁有電影製片廠和布拉格一大片上好的房地產。共黨政權1948年掌權後，他因為布爾喬亞資本家的階級成分而不准上學。
因為家中財產逐漸被國家充公，他經歷若干工作、上夜校通過高中考試、寫作，最後在劇場中擔任舞台工作人員、燈光師、劇場經理，然後是劇作家和導演。
共黨當局1968年鎮壓「布拉格之春」後，哈維不准從事劇場工作。他拒絕流亡國外，又經歷了若干工作。
其間他持續寫作，涉入反對運動愈來愈深，最終起草「七七憲章」（Chapter 77）。憲章是一份宣言書，挑戰共產黨，要求他們做到許下的尊重人權的國際承諾。
哈維位居反對運動領導者和發言人，不時受當局騷擾，1979年6月到1983年2月被當局囚禁。
哈維入獄期間寫給妻子的家書，後來集結成「獄中書─致妻子歐嘉」（Letters to Olga），成為國際暢銷書。
柏林圍牆倒塌後，捷克斯洛伐克是中歐最後一個結束共產黨極權統治的國家。
1989年權力和平移轉後，哈維在人民熱情支持下當選總統，然後被迫接受祖國一分為二，於1993年1月1日生效。
他1992年7月辭去國家元首，以接任新成立的捷克共和國總統。
捷克憲法規定，總統的職權大致限於扮演榮譽、典禮性角色。哈維監督捷克的民主與經濟轉型，包括1999年加入北大西洋公約組織（NATO）、及2004年加入歐洲聯盟（EU）。
哈維的妻子歐嘉曾稱他為「一個夢想家、浪漫主義者和大嘴巴」。歐嘉逝世後，哈維再婚，新娘是小他20歲的女演員維斯科諾娃（Dagma Veskrnova）。
哈維於2003年卸下總統一職，他在國外受歡迎的程度超過國內，之後獻身人權事務。
他常常支持古巴和中國大陸的異議人士、白俄羅斯的民主反對派、對抗緬甸軍事執政團的鬥爭、以及俄羅斯反蒲亭（Vladimir Putin）的反對派。
紐約時報 "Czechs’ Dissident Conscience, Turned President"
NY Times 原文
Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011
Czechs’ Dissident Conscience, Turned President
By DAN BILEFSKY and JANE PERLEZ
Published: December 18, 2011
CloseDiggRedditTumblrPermalink Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Mr. Havel himself into power, died on Sunday. He was 75.
His assistant, Sabina Tancevova, said Mr. Havel died at his country house in northern Bohemia.
A Czech Embassy spokesman in Paris, Michal Dvorak, said in a statement that Mr. Havel, a heavy smoker for decades who almost died during treatment for lung cancer in 1996, had been suffering from severe respiratory ailments since the spring.
A shy yet resilient, unfailingly polite but dogged man who articulated the power of the powerless, Mr. Havel spent five years in and out of Communist prisons, lived for two decades under close secret-police surveillance and endured the suppression of his plays and essays. He served 14 years as president, wrote 19 plays, inspired a film and a rap song and remained one of his generation’s most seductively nonconformist writers.
All the while, Mr. Havel came to personify the soul of the Czech nation.
His moral authority and his moving use of the Czech language cast him as the dominant figure during Prague street demonstrations in 1989 and as the chief behind-the-scenes negotiator who brought about the end of more than 40 years of Communist rule and the peaceful transfer of power known as the Velvet Revolution, a revolt so smooth that it took just weeks to complete, without a single shot fired.
He was chosen as post-Communist Czechoslovakia’s first president — a role he insisted was more duty than aspiration — and after the country split in January 1993, he became president of the Czech Republic. He linked the country firmly to the West, clearing the way for the Czech Republic to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 and the European Union five years later.
Both as a dissident and as a national leader, Mr. Havel (pronounced VAHTS-lahv HAH-vell) impressed the West as one of the most important political thinkers in Central Europe. He rejected the notion, posited by reform-minded Communist leaders like Alexander Dubcek in his own country, and years later by Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, that Communist rule could be made more humane.
His star status and personal interests drew world leaders to Prague, including the Dalai Lama, with whom Mr. Havel meditated for hours, and President Bill Clinton, who, during a state visit in 1994, joined a saxophone jam session at Mr. Havel’s favorite jazz club.
Even after Mr. Havel retired in 2003, leaders sought him out, including President Obama. At their meeting in March 2009, Mr. Havel warned of the perils of limitless hope being projected onto a leader. Disappointment, he noted, could boil over into anger and resentment. Mr. Obama replied that he was becoming acutely aware of the possibility.
Mr. Obama said that he was deeply saddened by Mr. Havel’s death. “His peaceful resistance shook the foundations of an empire, exposed the emptiness of a repressive ideology and proved that moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon,” he said Sunday in a statement.
Articulating Discontent
It was as a dissident that Mr. Havel most clearly championed the ideals of a civil society. He helped found Charter 77, the longest enduring human rights movement in the former Soviet bloc, and keenly articulated the lasting humiliations that Communism imposed on the individual.
In his now iconic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which circulated in underground editions in Czechoslovakia and was smuggled to other Warsaw Pact countries and to the West, Mr. Havel foresaw that the opposition could eventually prevail against the totalitarian state.
Mr. Havel, a child of bourgeois privilege whose family lost its wealth when the Communists came to power in 1948, first became active in the Writers Union in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, when his chief target was not Communism so much as it was the “reform Communism” that many were seeking.
During the Prague Spring of 1968, the brief period when reform Communists, led by Mr. Dubcek, believed that “socialism with a human face” was possible, Mr. Havel argued that Communism could never be tamed.
He wrote an article, “On the Theme of an Opposition,” that advocated the end of single-party rule, a bold idea at the time. In May 1968, he was invited by the American theater producer Joseph Papp to see the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of his second play, “The Memorandum.”
It was the last time Mr. Havel was allowed out of the country under Communist rule; the visit contributed to an abiding affection for New York.
(Page 2 of 4)
After the Soviets sent tanks to suppress the Prague reforms in August 1968, Mr. Havel persisted in the fight for political freedom. In August 1969 he organized a petition of 10 points that repudiated the politics of “normalization” with the Soviet Union. He was accused of subversion, and in 1970 was vilified on state television and banned as a writer.
At the time, tens of thousands of Communists were expelled from the party, deemed too sympathetic to the Dubcek reforms that were being reversed by the Czechoslovak leader Gustav Husak. Mr. Havel kept writing, and in 1975, in an open letter to Mr. Husak — the leader he eventually replaced — he attacked the regime, arguing that Czechoslovakia operated under “political apartheid” that separated the rulers from the ruled.
The government, Mr. Havel wrote, had chosen “the most dangerous road for society: the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances; of deadening life for the sake of increasing uniformity.”
In 1977, Mr. Havel was one of three leading organizers of Charter 77, a group of 242 signers who called for the human rights guaranteed under the 1975 Helsinki accords. Mr. Havel was quickly arrested, tried and convicted of subversion; he served three months in prison. He was arrested again in May 1979 on a charge of subversion and was sentenced to four and a half years.
The severity of this sentence brought protests from the Communist parties in France, Italy and Spain. Mr. Havel was eventually released in February 1983, suffering from pneumonia.
In prison, he was prohibited from writing anything but letters about “family matters” to his wife. These missives, he said, enabled him to make some sense of his incarceration. One of his themes was a warning to his persecutors that by their repression of human freedom, they were ultimately undercutting their own existence.
His refusal to break with Charter 77 led to other, briefer periods of detention as his celebrity status grew abroad. In January 1989, he was detained and tried after defying police orders to stay away from a demonstration.
His release in May that year represented the beginning of the end for Czechoslovakia’s Communist government, which was badly out of step with reforms under way in neighboring Poland and Hungary and, under the leadership of Mr. Gorbachev, in the Soviet Union itself.
During the 1980s, Mr. Havel refused government pressure to emigrate. Not widely known at home outside dissident and intellectual circles in Prague, he became a focus for some Western diplomats and visitors, who would tramp up to the top-floor apartment of a six-story house that his father had built and philosophize with Mr. Havel while gazing across the Vltava River at the Prague Castle, long the seat of the country’s rulers.
He earned virtually nothing from the menial job he was forced to take at a brewery, but had money from the royalties of publications overseas. He bought a Mercedes-Benz and decorated his book-crammed apartment with abstract paintings. He also owned the cottage at Hradecek where he died.
Velvet Revolution
Mr. Havel’s chance at power came in November 1989, eight days after the Berlin Wall fell.
A tentative dialogue had already started when the police broke up an officially sanctioned student demonstration on Nov. 17, beating many demonstrators and arresting others.
Two days later, Mr. Havel convened a meeting in the Magic Lantern, a Prague theater, and he and other dissidents established the Civic Forum. It called for the resignation of the leading Communists, investigation of the police action and the release of all political prisoners.
The next day, about 200,000 people took to the streets in Prague, the first of several demonstrations that ended Communist domination.
It was in the theater’s smoke-filled rooms that Mr. Havel mapped the strategy and proclamations that finally undermined Communist rule. “It was extraordinary the degree to which everything ultimately revolved around this one man,” wrote the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who was present.
“In almost all the forum’s major decisions and statements,” Mr. Garton Ash added, “he was the final arbiter, the one person who could somehow balance the very different tendencies and interests in the movement.”
(Page 3 of 4)
Once installed at the Castle, Mr. Havel gradually discarded crumpled jeans and sweaters for crisp shirts and somber suits, although he often seemed more at home in the counterculture. On a trip abroad in 1995, he ignored awaiting dignitaries and lingered on an airport tarmac for a chat with Mick Jagger.
In the first months of his presidency, visitors to the labyrinthine Castle included Frank Zappa and the Rolling Stones. Mr. Havel covered a side of the building with a large neon-red heart, and pedaled the corridors with a child’s scooter.
“Initially, he had difficulty changing his mentality from being a dissident to a politician,” said Jiri Pehe, who was his chief political adviser from 1997 to 1999. But Mr. Pehe argued that Mr. Havel had been a better president than many had expected.
“Because of his moral authority, he was able to stretch a weak presidency beyond what was written in the Constitution,” Mr. Pehe said.
But critics said Mr. Havel, a self-professed reluctant leader, learned to like power a little too much. Many Czechs were also disappointed that he refused to outlaw the Communist Party or to put on trial the system that had allowed neighbors to send one another to labor camps.
In July 1992, as Czechoslovakia began to break up, Mr. Havel resigned as president rather than preside over the split. He spoke then of the difficult metamorphosis from philosopher to politician.
“Putting into practice the ideals to which I have adhered all my life, which guided me in the dissident years, becomes much more difficult in practical politics,” he said, before being later elected president of the new Czech Republic.
As soon as he came to power, Mr. Havel steered his country toward the West. On his first visit to the United States as president, in February 1990, Mr. Havel stressed that American financial aid was not as important as technical assistance to help his country — historically an industrial power — compete again in the international marketplace.
Days later, he met Mr. Gorbachev in Moscow and swiftly negotiated the withdrawal of 70,000 Soviet troops stationed in Czechoslovakia.
At home, Mr. Havel’s role evolved into one of educator and moral persuader. In weekly radio talks, he often addressed human rights, touching on issues that were delicate in Czech society. He championed, for instance, the rights of Gypsies, or Roma, despite surveys that showed that most Czechs would not want a Gypsy as a neighbor.
Early in his presidency, he also went against popular sentiment when he formed a commission to inquire into the expulsion of three million Sudeten Germans after World War II.
Political ideas, not economics, interested him. His country, widely considered to have made a smooth transition from Communism to market democracy, came in for his devastating critique in December 1997, when he attacked corruption and the sell-off of government-run industries in a thinly veiled barb at his political nemesis, the longtime prime minister — and now president — Vaclav Klaus.
Expressing disdain for what had happened to Czech society under Mr. Klaus — an ally of convenience in the days of the 1989 revolution — Mr. Havel told Parliament that a “post-Communist morass” had allowed “the most immoral people” to achieve financial success at the expense of others.
Mr. Klaus, a right-wing maverick who espouses the untrammeled capitalism that Mr. Havel disliked, succeeded Mr. Havel as president in 2003. On Sunday, Mr. Klaus paid tribute to Mr. Havel, calling him “the symbol of the new era of the Czech state.”
While many in the West worshiped Mr. Havel, in his native country he was regarded with deep affection but also ambivalence, and even scorn. His slogan during the revolution that truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred was mocked by foes, who accused him of naïveté. But he never lost his childlike idealism and would sign his name with a small heart.
Mr. Havel’s standing with Czechs faltered somewhat in 1997, after his surprise marriage to Dagmar Veskrnova — a flamboyant and outspoken actress who had once played a topless vampire in a film — only a year after the death of his much-admired first wife of 31 years, Olga. In January 1998 Parliament, resentful of what was seen as Mr. Havel’s arrogant behavior with his new wife and his meddling in political affairs, elected him to a second presidential term by only one vote.
(Page 4 of 4)
Erik Tabery, a Czech journalist and the author of a book on the Czech presidency, said some Czechs resented Mr. Havel for holding up an uncomfortable mirror to their history of passivity. “While the Communists ruled for 40 years, most Czechs stayed at home and did nothing,” Mr. Tabery said. “Havel did something.”
Mr. Havel had his own theory. He frequently told interviewers that he had unwittingly become a character from a fairy tale, whom he himself did not recognize.
A Child of Privilege
Born on Oct. 5, 1936, Mr. Havel was one of two sons of Bozena and Vaclav Havel. His father, a civil engineer, was a major commercial real estate developer who acquired important property. When the Communists took power three years after World War II, the family holdings were taken over by the state. After Communist rule ended, Mr. Havel and his brother, Ivan, won back much of the property.
Mr. Havel would later write that his privileged upbringing heightened his sensitivity to inequality.
“I was different from my schoolmates whose families did not have domestics, nurses or chauffeurs,” he wrote. “But I experienced these differences as a disadvantage; I felt excluded from the company of my peers.”
He started writing, he said, to overcome his feeling of being an outsider. Because of his background, the Communists blocked him from going to college, and at age 15 he started work as a technician in a chemistry lab.
Mr. Havel was called up for military service in 1957, and wrote a satirical play while in the army. In 1960, he joined the Theater on the Balustrade as a stagehand. In 1963 he wrote his first publicly performed play, “The Garden Party,” about a person who has lost his sense of identity.
In 1956 Mr. Havel met Olga Splichalova, a lively, dashing actress, whom he married in 1964. A working-class heroine for many Czechs, she helped to inspire the collection of essays, written as letters from prison, and published as “Letters to Olga.” In dissident circles and beyond, Mr. Havel was a celebrated womanizer. Mrs. Havlova, who was fiercely defensive of her husband, was said by friends to have a certain reassurance when he was in prison, because “at least she knew where he was.”
When Mr. Havel became president, his wife seldom took part in formal events, but used her new platform to campaign for the handicapped. She died of cancer in January 1996. They had no children. Mr. Havel is survived by his second wife, Dagmar, and his brother, Ivan.
After stepping down as president in 2003, Mr. Havel, ailing and tired, returned to writing, insisting he was happy with a peaceful life. In his memoir, “To the Castle and Back,” published in 2007, he called his political rise an accident of history. Post-Communist society disappointed him, he said.
In 2008, Mr. Havel re-emerged as a playwright with a new absurdist tragic-comedy, “Leaving,” depicting a womanizing former political leader who grudgingly confronts life outside of politics.
He never stopped preaching that the fight for political freedom needed to outlive the end of the cold war. He praised the American invasion of Iraq for deposing a dictator, Saddam Hussein.
He continued to worry about what he called “the old European disease” — “the tendency to make compromises with evil, to close one’s eyes to dictatorship, to practice a politics of appeasement.”
沒有留言:
張貼留言