Czechs celebrate 20 years since the fall of communism

WITH their country in deep political crisis, Czechs took to the streets throughout the country yesterday to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of decades of repressive communist rule.

They celebrated with exhibitions, concerts, speeches and rallies. Thousands of people in the capital, Prague, participated in a re-enactment of a student protest — an evocation of the event that triggered the Velvet Revolution that peacefully toppled the communist regime in what was then Czechoslovakia.

November 17, 1989, began with fiery speeches at a university campus in Prague, inspiring thousands of students to march downtown toward Wenceslas Square. As darkness fell, police cracked down hard, beating demonstrators with truncheons.

But the crowds mushroomed in the ensuing days, with demonstrators chanting: “You have lost already!”

They were right. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and communism in the region, by December 10, Czechoslovakia had a new government. On December 29, Vaclav Havel, a dissident playwright who had spent several years in prison, was elected the country’s first democratic president in a half century by a parliament still dominated by communist hard-liners.