Facebook campaign wants all presidents named Havel

[January 14, 2012]  PRAGUE (AP) -- Vaclav Havel airport, Vaclav Havel library, Vaclav Havel street, Vaclav Havel school.

Numerous efforts to rename places to honor the former Czech president who helped bring down communism in his homeland have provoked a Facebook initiative designed to last generations: It demands that all the country's future presidents bear Havel's name.

Ridiculing the wave of renaming, the initiative calls on Parliament to adopt such a law. It also wants current President Vaclav Klaus, the late Havel's political archrival, to "immediately" take Havel's name.

"Something majestic has to bear the name of Vaclav Havel, something that will forever and ever exist beyond our mere mortal lives and that is the presidential office!," says the initiative, which has been joined by almost 6,000 people.

The Czech government is to discuss a plan to name Prague's state-owned international airport after Havel after more than 80,000 signed a petition in support.

Paris will open a new library with Havel's name next year and Gdansk -- the birthplace of Poland's Solidarity anti-communist movement has already renamed a street after the former dissident playwright, who led the 1989 peaceful Velvet Revolution that ended more than 40 years of Communist rule in then-Czechoslovakia.

Havel died Dec. 18 at 75.

[Associated Press]

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