Playwright, Freedom Icon Vaclav Havel Dies, Age 75

He was a dissident playwright who went on to become a symbol of freedom in Europe. ?Vaclav Havel has died.

FOX News Radio’s Chris Hoenig reports:

Vaclav Havel was a man of peace, peacefully ending communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, becoming the country’s first democratically-elected President in four decades.

(Havel) “This is a world of a single global civilization, which makes us all participants in one common destiny.”

He would peacefully oversee the break-up of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, before leaving office in 2003.

Havel’s plays were banned by the hard-line government of the 60’s and 70’s, but he continued to write, his essays being mentioned in the Broadway show “Rent” as a symbol of bohemianism.

Vaclav Havel died Sunday morning at his weekend home in the Czech Republic. ?He was 75.

Chris Hoenig, FOX News Radio.