On Sunday, Slovaks and Czechs remembered the first and only president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the communist regime, who passed away five years ago, on December 18, 2011. A writer and philosopher by profession, Havel was the president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the separation of the country and subsequently the Czech President until 2003.
In 1992, when the separation of Czechoslovakia became inevitable, Havel, who had staunchly opposed the break up, resigned from the presidency stating that he was not able to fulfil his duties because he had vowed loyalty to the federative republic.
In 2006, the Academy of Performing arts in Bratislava awarded Havel an honorary doctorate and in 2009 he became an honorary citizen of the Slovak capital, Bratislava.
TASR reports that Václav Havel was born on October 5th 1936 in Prague in a renowned family of entrepreneurs and intellectuals who played a major part in Czech cultural and political events between the two World Wars. Due to his 'bourgeois background', the Communist regime did not allow him to choose the direction of his studies after finishing elementary school. He studied chemistry in an evening high school and then economics at university. However, after unsuccessfully trying to switch to film studies, he was not allowed to continue even in economics. In the 1960s, when the Communist dictatorship loosened its grip a little, he found a job as a stage technician in a theatre and managed to earn a degree in dramaturgy as a part time student. After Czechoslovakia's experiment in political liberalization known as the Prague Spring was crushed in 1968 and the Communist Party inaugurated a new wave of repression under the slogan of "normalisation", he became a dissident and opponent of the regime, for which he spent five years in prison.
