Laogai Research Foundation founder and executive director Harry Wu paid a visit today to the Czech Embassy in Washington, DC, to offer condolences on the death of Vaclav Havel.
The former president of the Czech Republic and of former Czechoslovakia passed away on Saturday, 17 December 2012. Harry was saddened to hear of the death of such an advocate for truth, democracy and human rights. They had met several times and shared a passionate commitment to exposing the crimes of Communist regimes and liberating their populations. Havel expressed his support of Harry’s fight against repression by the People’s Republic of China, and told Harry he wished to devote more time to the cause of democracy in China after completing his theatrical works. Havel was the chair of the International Council of the Human Rights Foundation, and a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Havel was born to a wealthy family in Prague in 1936, and was stigmatized by the Communist regime for his “bourgeois” background, so much that it did not allow him to study formally after he had completed his required schooling in 1951. Harry Wu was born to a well-to-do entrepreneurial family in Shanghai in 1937, and was arrested and sent to the Laogai as a college student in 1960 for “rightist” family ties. Harry felt great kinship with Havel in their similar lifelong struggles against totalitarian regimes.
To honor his hero and friend, Harry and four LRF staff brought a basket of white roses to the Czech Embassy, garnished with white ribbons bearing their signatures. (White is the traditional color of mourning in China.) Harry expressed his sympathy to the Czech Ambassador Petr Gandalovic and other guests, before signing a personal note in the book of condolence. Following Chinese tradition, he presented the flowers and bowed three times to the displayed portrait of the deceased.
In mourning Vaclav Havel, we celebrate his great intellect and outstanding leadership against injustice. The Laogai Research Foundation hopes that his passing will inspire the Czech people and the world to remember the people of China, still imprisoned behind an Eastern Iron Curtain, and all the thousands of human rights and democracy activists like Havel who still languish in the Laogai prison camps. The recent death of Kim Jong-il also leaves us hopeful that this Iron Curtain of Asia may soon imitate Czechoslovakia’s and be lifted in North Korea, the People's Republic of China, and other totalitarian regimes.