Friends Vlaclav Havel and Lech Walesa in a pub in Warsaw, March 1998: photo - EPA/JANEK SKARZYNSKI
A spokesperson for the playwright and politician says Havel died early Sunday morning at his home in the north of the Czech Republic.
In recent years, Havel, who lead the Velvet Revolution which brought down communism in 1989, had suffered from lung cancer, among many other ailments.
“He was a great man. I will miss him. May he rest in peace,” former president of Poland and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa told the TVN 24 news station.
Poland's first prime minister after the fall of communism in 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki has said: "Vaclav Havel was a great politician and humanist. His passing is a great loss.”
Czech prime minister Petr Nečas said that Havel deserves the highest respect.
“Mr. President was a symbol of what happened in 1989. Thanks to him our country moved quietly to democracy, entered the European Union and NATO. Havel is one of the greatest Czech politicians of this and the previous century,” the Czech PM said.
Velvet revolutionary
Vaclav Havel, voted in 2005 by the Prospect (UK) magazine as one of the world's 100 top intellectuals, was the tenth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989 to 1992) and the first president of the Czech Republic (1993 to 2003).
“Vaclav Havel was a man who, for decades, shaped the reality of Central and Eastern Europe and was one of the few who so positively influenced the whole of Europe,” president of the European Parliament and former prime minister of Poland, Jerzy Buzek, has said.
Speaker of Poland's upper house of parliament (Senate) Bogdan Borusewicz says he greatly regrets the death of Vaclav Havel.
"it is with huge regret I learn of the news of the passing away of this great man," Borusewicz said, Sunday.
“Vaclav Havel was a great authority, not only for Czechs and Slovaks, but also for us Poles,” he added. (pg)
source: IAR/PAP/TVP