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ated the government's resignation on 3 December. A 'government of national under-
standing' was formed with the communists as a minority group. Havel was elected
president by the Federal Assembly on 29 December.
In one of his most controversial acts as president, Václav Havel in 1990
offered a formal apology to the Sudeten Germans for the mass expulsions
of ethnic Germans post-WWII.
Almost immediately after the revolution, problems arose between Czechs and
Slovaks. The Slovaks had long harboured grievances against the dominant Czechs,
and many Slovaks dreamed of having their own state. On 1 January 1993, amid much
hand-wringing on both sides, especially from Havel, the Czechs and Slovaks peace-
fully divided into independent states.
THE LATE PLAYWRIGHT-PRESIDENT VÁCLAV HAVEL
As Europeans lament the dearth of great men and women in modern times, one
man whom everyone can look up to is the late Czech president and former dis-
sident, Václav Havel. Havel, who died in 2011 at the age of 75, was the un-
shakeable moral authority behind the 1989 Velvet Revolution and the country's
first post-communist president. He was also famously a playwright and
communist-era essayist, whose underground letters simultaneously excoriated
his collaborationist countrymen and held up a moral alternative to official com-
munist pabulum based on universal concepts of dignity and human rights.
Havel was born into a wealthy family on October 5 1936. Had WWII and the
subsequent communist coup not intervened, he might very well have lived out a
successful life, minding his family's various businesses, but that trajectory
changed forever with the communist takeover in 1948. His family was stripped of
its property and the young Havel was denied access to higher education.
Havel's enthusiasm for the liberal reforms of the 'Prague Spring' of the 1960s
and his avowed opposition to communist rule in the 1970s made him an enemy
