Czech press survey - December 20

He would know that Czech diplomacy should make it clear to our partners that we expect the participation at the highest level, he adds.

This would not be dictated by Havel's vanity, but by the need to retain our position, Weiss writes.

When Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, his funeral was attended by the French president and U.S. secretary of state, he adds.

Now the Czech Republic has the right to expect its allies to pay the same respect to our president as to a bloody dictator, Weiss writes.

"Personally, I only presumed that the news on the death of the first post-Communist president will only hurt my own generation and older people," Michal Musil writes in Mlada fronta Dnes.

These were the people who stopped to be children in November 1989 and for whom the fall of the Communist regime and the Velvet Revolution became one of the milestones of their lives, he adds.

However, "when watching television I could see that the commemorative act for Havel was staged by Prague students," he adds.

It is very likely that Vaclav Havel would be happy at this, Musil writes.

Former president Vaclav Havel certainly had merits for the Czech state, but this should not be enacted in any special law, Petr Sabata writes about the proposal in Hospodarske noviny.

Havel was not only a politician, but also an excellent playwright, a man with talent for paradox, a president with a heart in his signature, Sabata writes.

Havel can be imagined as being played in theatres and at festivals, read in schools and also remembered in pubs. This is certainly true, he adds.

However, Czechs should not constrain Havel to a single sentence in the Law Gazette, Sabata writes.

Author: ČTK
www.ctk.cz