Quiet Courage Marks Dissident : Czechoslovakia: Opposition leader Vaclav Havel says he seeks truth and justice, not power.

Amid the sense of freedom that has come to Czechoslovakia during the last two weeks, a new political statement has appeared in the form of a flashy red, white and blue campaign button.

In addition to the Czechoslovak national colors, the button carries the name of opposition leader Vaclav Havel and the words “Havel for President.”

The button reflects the popularity of the most prominent figure in the country’s opposition movement, but it falls short of reality.

While the 53-year-old Czechoslovak playwright has clearly been the key opposition personality, he has always made it plain he wants no part of power.

“I am an amateur, standing in for a professional politician,” he told a group of reporters after announcing the creation of the opposition group Civic Forum that toppled one of the last remaining hard-line Communist regimes in a matter of two weeks.

“My ambition is to be a playwright again.”

His views characterize those of Civic Forum itself--a group that insists it is not a political party, resisted even proposing names for the new government (although it eventually relented) and makes no claim on political power.

Quiet, shy and excessively polite by nature, Havel’s uncertain personal demeanor masks a brutal honesty and a quiet courage that flow as a common thread through his writings.

His famous 1975 “Letter To Dr. Gustav Husak,” the Communist Party leader at the time, stands as one of the most powerful essays even written on the spiritual deprivation that lies behind the facade of normalcy in repressive states.

“True enough the country is calm,” he wrote to Husak. “Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?”

The portrayal of the agents of state repression more as mindless apparatchiks than as a cunning force of evil may seem surreal to those in the West, but to Czechoslovaks, they are frighteningly accurate.

In interviews, Havel explains his opposition in unfettered terms.

“I simply take the side of truth against any lie, of sense against nonsense, justice against injustice.”

Havel was born into a wealthy Prague family in 1936.

His father and grandfather were highly successful builders, and Havel’s present fifth-floor apartment--a product of his father’s work--has a bay window with views of both the city’s ornate 14th-Century Charles Bridge and the towering Prague Castle that dates back to the 9th Century.

While the fruits of his family’s entrepreneurial spirit made his early years ones of privilege, they also targeted him as a member of the bourgeois enemy when the Communists seized power in 1948.

He lost his place in school at 15 and began a long, torturous relationship with Czechoslovak communism.

Havel has worked as a laborer, a taxi driver and a stagehand. He has been jailed three times--once for nearly four years--while his essays and plays have been banned from Czechoslovak public consumption for 20 years.

He has rarely flinched.

When offered the chance to emigrate to New York in the late 1970s, where one of his plays was beginning production, he refused to go.

“I am Czech,” he explained to a free-lance journalist earlier this year. “This was not my choice, it was my fate. But I accept it, and I try to do something for my country because I live here.”

In 1968, he helped transmit the drama of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia on the short-lived Free Czech Radio.

Seven years later later, he co-founded the Czechoslovak human rights movement Charter 77, and although blocked by authorities from participating in public life, nevertheless became a beacon of hope for those struggling for freedom.

In a tiny opposition of intellectuals, the power and clarity of his ideas stood out.

In a country that worships great writers and good theater, Havel excelled in both.

Students marching toward Wenceslas Square on the fateful night that their demonstration was broken up by riot police shouted “Long live Havel!” as they walked.

As they passed the National Theatre, they shouted, “Stage Havel plays!”

In the hours after the student beatings, it was Havel who made the first crucial contacts with those who created Civic Forum and persuaded the leadership of the small Socialist Party to forsake its long partnership with the Communists and join the opposition.

In the days that followed, he remained the central figure in the opposition push that eventually toppled the Communist hard-liners.

Only on Sunday, with news that the new coalition government contained a preponderance of Communists, did Havel face his first criticism.

Reportedly against the objections of many advisers, Havel argued for a halt to the demonstrations in the belief the opposition goals were virtually achieved.

Certainly Havel lacks anything akin to the killer instinct of a politician.

Despite his harassment and imprisonment by the Communist authorities, he has never called for revenge.

Speaking of the hard-liners, who had tormented him for years before their fall from power in recent days, Havel told the West German weekly Der Spiegel: “Personally, I’ll be satisfied if these people go on living in the luxurious villas they built and just never again meddle in the politics of this country.”