According to a recent poll 49 per cent of Czechs are against naming Prague Airport after Vaclav Havel. From an international point of view, you have to ask what is wrong with naming your capital's airport after a dissident and intellectual who spearheaded the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia and the break-up of the Soviet Bloc?
Just look at the guest list of Havel's funeral in Prague last year to see how influential he was: the Clintons, Lech Walesa, Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron, John Major and most European foreign ministers. Looking at that list it's not hard to guess which side of the political spectrum Havel's detractors come from. Unfortunately, there is still a sizable number of hard-line leftists in the Czech Republic, who stayed away and tried to forget Havel.
But even some Havel admirers object to renaming the airport after him. They say that he never liked flying and would not have wanted to be remembered in this way. This all sounds rather petty. It's as though they're in some kind of competition to tell everybody what Havel would and would not have liked best. 'Oh, I knew him better than you', 'Oh no you did not, I knew him better than anybody else' and so on and so forth.
I don't think Havel would have minded. It would probably suit his sense of humour, to see all the foreign tourists struggling to pronounce his name correctly as they arrive in the Bohemian lands.
Overall, it's a good way to remember the man who gave birth to the idea of 'the power of the powerless' which is still used by people fighting oppression the world over today. Although he is a major political figure, he still lacks the fame of JFK and John Lennon, who probably did not need airports named after them to be known and remembered. And how come there's no Winston Churchill airport in London. Imagine that!
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