President Vaclav Havel's medical team said yesterday that emergency surgery performed in Austria on the Czech leader had been successful and that the worst was behind him.
"The operation ended successfully," the Czech deputy health minister, Dr Miroslav Cerbak, who heads Mr Havel's medical team, said in a statement issued by the presidential office in Prague. Mr Havel (61) had surgery at Innsbruck after becoming critically ill with a suspected perforation of the large intestine. He was taken ill with stomach pains while on a two-week holiday with his wife in the Tyrolean Alps.
The head of state of the Czech Republic, who in January won a final five-year term in office, has struggled with health problems ever since a cancer operation on his lungs in December 1996. He was in a "very serious condition" yesterday, the chief surgeon of Innsbruck University Clinic, Prof Ernst Bodner, said. The former dissident playwright, one of the most potent symbols of the collapse of the Soviet grip on eastern Europe, has been regularly hospitalised since 1996.
A one-time stage-hand, who was refused a higher education under anti-bourgeois regulations of the communist regime in then Czechoslovakia, Havel was born in October 1936 into a wealthy Czech family. He turned early to the theatre, working behind the scenes for years before he won international fame as a playwright.
Over his long writing career, he has written 13 plays and six political essays. His works have been translated worldwide.
Mr Havel saw front-line political action during the 1968 Prague Spring, when the reform movement was crushed by Soviet tanks.
His election as Czechoslovak president in 1989 was followed by a wave of international accolades including the 1990 UNESCO prize for the promotion of human rights and a nomination for the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.