Today playwright dissident and the president Václav Havel died aged 75. Havel was a signatory of Charta 77 and one of the leaders of the movement that led to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Then he became president of Czechoslovakia and in 1993 the first democratically elected president of the Czech Republic. Despite surgery because of lung cancer in 1996 he stayed in the position until 2003.
