Word: havelent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sober up. "For 40 years you have heard on this day from the mouths of my predecessors . . . how our country is flourishing, how many more millions of tons of steel we have produced, how we are all happy, how we believe in our government," the newly elected President Vaclav Havel told the nation. "I assume you have not named me to this office so that I too should...
...inaugural address, Havel's talk was an extraordinary jeremiad -- eloquent, gentle, but unstinting in its criticism. It was the last kind of speech that might have been expected from a man who had just won a war decades long and whose name had been cried out like a victory chant in the same Wenceslas Square the night before. Havel noted the achievement of 1989 by paraphrasing 17th century theologian Comenius -- "Your government, my people, has returned to you" -- but his speech was the antithesis of triumphalism. Instead, it was a bracing recitation of urgent needs, an inventory of the damage...
...unemployment and widespread bankruptcies. In Sofia the communist government held its first set of talks with opposition leaders. But already the new government was faced with another challenge: a countrywide general strike and mass protests against the restoration of religious and cultural freedom to the country's minority Turks. Havel's government set out on a course of economic restructuring by devaluing the crown from a rate of nine to the dollar to 38 for tourists and 17 for commercial transactions, thus taking aim at a huge black market in currency and possibly preparing the way for full convertibility...
...brio. She has publicly criticized Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's policies and rallied British writers to think more politically. She marches for Soviet Jewry. She organizes petitions and badgers officials to help free dissident writers in jails across Europe and Africa. One of these has made history: playwright Vaclav Havel, the new Czech President. For years, from his prison cell, he exchanged letters with Pinter. The couple will visit Havel to share his triumph in February...
PROFILE: Czech man of conscience Vaclav Havel...