Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel, Jeremy Kinsman retired from the Canadian Foreign Service in 2006 after 40 years during which he was posted to the UN, Washington and much of Europe. He was Canada’s ambassador to Moscow in 1992 and followed this up as our lead representative in Rome, London and at the European Union in Brussels. Apart from writing regularly for CBCNews.ca, he is a lead writer on foreign affairs for Policy Options magazine, a distinguished visiting diplomat at Ryerson University in Toronto and resident international scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He directs an international democracy program for the Community of Democracies.
We are all hugely diminished today by the passing of a man, small of height but towering in moral stature and courage over those he called the “professional rulers.”

Vaclav Havel was a playwright and essayist who found himself unable to live in accommodation with totalitarian, police state and, indeed, foreign occupation of his proud country.

He became his people’s beacon of freedom, an inspirer and organizer of resistance to the “anonymous, impersonal and inhuman power” – the “dictatorship of a political bureaucracy” – that tried to smother his voice and kept him either locked up or under complete and constant surveillance.

They didn’t succeed.

Through his writing and example, and through his creation of the dissident movement Charter 77, he conveyed the imperative “that the truth had to be spoken loudly and collectively, regardless of the certainty of sanctions and the uncertainty of any tangible results in the immediate future.” \

Vaclav Havel, in 2009, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain and the beginnings of today’s Czech Republic. (Reuters)
His diagnosis of the “profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie,” which referred to the autocracy of Soviet rule, stands gigantically as valid today in so much of the world.

As he wrote to the 1989 PEN Congress in Montreal, which Czech authorities barred him from attending in person, freedom is indivisible.

King Jong Il Dead

King Jong Il Dead, North Korea’s long-time leader Kim Jong Il has died. The official Korean Central News Agency reported Monday the 69-year-old reclusive leader died Saturday of a heart attack while on a train for one of his “field guidance” tours. The agency attributed his death to “physical and mental over-work.”

KCNA said his funeral will be held on December 28 in Pyongyang. A period of national mourning was declared from December 17 to 29.

Kim Jong Il came to power after his father, North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung, died in 1994. Reliable biographical information about Mr. Kim is scarce. He rarely appeared in public and his voice was seldom broadcast.

He may be best remembered for defying the international community and boosting North Korea’s nuclear program, while millions of North Koreans were starving.

Late last year, Mr. Kim promoted his youngest son Kim Jong Un to the rank of four-star general, in what was seen as a bid to extend the world’s only communist family dynasty to a third generation.

The KCNA on Monday urged people to follow Kim Jong Un, who is believed to be around 28 years old.

North Koreans expressed shock at the news of Mr. Kim’s death, with many people crying openly in the streets.

Workers at an electric wire factory were seen in tears as they watched the announcement on state television.

Factory worker Jo Jae Sok said he could not believe the news. “Leader Kim Jong Il is always with us. I saw him on TV every day. We have worked hard for the modernization of the factory under difficult conditions, eagerly waiting for him to come to our factory again. I can’t believe the news about his passing away.”