An icon of anti-communist dissidence and the symbol of the democratization of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, who became the first President of non-Communist Czechoslovakia in 1989 and steered his country through a heart wrenching partition-described by many as “a velvet divorce”- in 1992 when the Czech and Slovak republics were born and left office in 2003, a year before the Czech republic became a member of the EU, died on December 18, 2011 near Prague.