Prague - The last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic in one person continues his journey back to his own roots.
Last year Václav Havel wrote his first play in nearly two decades, marking a return to the world of theatre, which he once called his own.
This week he joined a group of human rights activists who came together for a seminar titled Dissidents and Freedom, an event organized by the Documentary Film Festival One World at the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Černínský Palace in Prague.
Blinded by business interests
Václav Havel was the seminar's guest of honor and the main speaker.
He shared his views on life as a dissident with his counterparts from Burma, Belarus, Russia, Turkmenistan, Cuba and North Korea.
Like him, most of them spent time in jail and some of them have been living in forced exile.
But it is not only the non-democratic regimes in their own countries that they are concerned with; it is also governments in countries of the free world that have economic interests in their homelands, often forgetting about the human rights issues.
World Against Violence
In his closing remarks at the conference, President Havel challenged his colleagues to consider a possibility of launching an international initiative of dissidents using their voice to highlight cases of human rights violations across the globe.
Suggested working title of the proposed independent counterpart of the United Nations, as he called it, is World Against Violence.
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