In a Watershed for Czechs, Vaclav Havel Leaving Presidency

PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- President Vaclav Havel, the former dissident writer who helped topple communism here, leaves office today in a transition that marks the end of an era.

An international voice of moral leadership since he faced off against Czechoslovakia’s Soviet-backed dictatorship at great personal risk, Havel, 66, saw his once enormous domestic popularity wane in the late 1990s to that of an ordinary politician. In recent days, however, as Czechs have contemplated his departure, there has been an outpouring of fond reminiscing in his honor.

Nearly 100 of the country’s most popular singers and actors took part in a goodbye spectacular Thursday at Prague’s National Theater. In one humorous skit, performers tried to elect Havel king. Another had God joking with him about ties to actresses. (Havel’s second wife, Dagmar, is a former actress.)

Among the musicians was the Czech rock band the Plastic People of the Universe, which Havel stood with against official persecution in the 1970s in one of the period’s great cultural -- and political -- clashes between dissidents and Communist authorities. As the group sang, the outgoing president was visibly moved.

Of the key 1980s dissidents who brought down communism and then rose to national leadership in the former Soviet bloc states of Central and Eastern Europe, Havel is the last to leave office. Unlike Lech Walesa, the shipyard worker who headed Poland’s Solidarity trade union movement and went on to serve his nation as president, Havel exercised influence primarily as a romantic intellectual offering moral inspiration, not as an organizer or leader of a political movement.

“He was never a politician like Lech Walesa,” said Jirina Siklova, a sociologist at Charles University in Prague.

Instead, Havel was “the active intellectual” with a dissident past, broad international contacts and personal charm, which made him accepted as a friend and equal by many of the world’s most powerful presidents and prime ministers, Siklova said. Havel served as a “moral voice” within this group of leaders, a role they could accept and welcome precisely because he came from a small country without real power, she added.

In what some see as a reflection of the difficulty in replacing a man of global stature, the Czech Parliament has been unsuccessful in two attempts to elect a successor to the largely ceremonial presidential post, which Havel made influential through the power of his words and example.

The onetime playwright is credited with leading his country out of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact and into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and he also helped it win an invitation to join the European Union next year.

The country will go without a president until someone is chosen in coming weeks either by Parliament or possibly by the people, if there is a legal change to allow for a direct election. In the interim, presidential powers by law are to be shared by the prime minister and the head of the lower house of Parliament.

“Now our political parties are looking for a personality who will be acceptable to all,” Siklova said. “It means this new president will be only an average person ... and he will be compared to Vaclav Havel. It will be very difficult for the new president.”

Havel made the final foreign trip of his presidency last month, visiting Slovakia, the other country formed with the Jan. 1, 1993, split of Czechoslovakia -- a breakup that Havel struggled unsuccessfully to avoid.

After leading the 1989 “Velvet Revolution,” which peacefully ushered in democracy, Havel had served as president of Czechoslovakia from December 1989 to July 1992. He was president of the Czech Republic from 1993 on but was limited by Czech law to two five-year terms.

At a news conference in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, Havel was asked whether he would consider running again for president if the law was changed to allow it. His answer appeared to reflect the burdens he had carried.

“Definitely not,” he replied. “I’ve been president for long enough, and I’m not in the best of health. I’m feeling somewhat tired, feeling the need to absorb, to experience, to write. Definitely, I would not accept another candidacy.”

A heavy smoker for most of his life, Havel underwent surgery in 1996 for removal of a cancerous tumor and part of a lung. Since then, he has had repeated serious bouts of pneumonia. In 1998, he also had surgery for a ruptured colon.

As president, Havel was a consistent voice for humanitarianism and reconciliation. He sought to heal the wounds in Czech-German relations left from World War II, and he spoke out strongly and repeatedly against discrimination aimed at his country’s Roma, or Gypsies.

Olga Sumpfova, 24, an office worker who braved subfreezing temperatures to watch the National Theater gala on a huge outdoor screen, said she most admires Havel for being “a truthful, nice person.”

“He had good reasons and good ideas for everything he has ever done,” she said, adding that his most important accomplishment is that his country is free.

Havel said at his January news conference in Bratislava that, once out of office, he wants to “put my thoughts into order, gain perspective, think through a few matters, read, reflect and think of what I may write in the future.”

To the end of his time in office, Havel never lost a touch of the 1960s flower child. Just before acting as host of a historic NATO summit in November, he allowed the installation of a giant pulsating neon heart on the hilltop castle that was his presidential home and office, calling it a symbol of “love, understanding and decency.”

Friday night, the heart came down.

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Times staff writer Holley reported from Moscow and special correspondent Drapalova from Prague.