A emergência do ISIS/ISIL e as ameaças ao equilíbrio de forças no Oriente Médio - Carmen Lícia Palazzo

A emergência do ISIS/ISIL e as ameaças ao equilíbrio de forças no Oriente Médio, por Carmen Lícia Palazzo

Mundorama, 28/06/2014 POR COORDENAÇÃO 0 COMMENTS

 

 

 

 

 

 

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O Oriente Médio, palco de incessantes conflitos com profundas raízes históricas, viu surgir recentemente um ator que é motivo de preocupação tanto regional quanto internacional já que prega a abolição de fronteiras, o desmantelamento dos estados nacionais e a imposição estrita da sharia, a lei islâmica. Trata-se do grupo que ficou conhecido como ISIS ou ISIL, siglas referentes às denominações de Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ou Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, uma organização muçulmana sunita que defende a jihad para alcançar seu objetivo final, o retorno ao califado extinto em 1924, e que deverá se sobreporà ideia de pertencimento nacional. Para o ISIS o califado, e portanto a umma, comunidade dos muçulmanos, é a única referência legítima de união dos fiéis.

A decisão das lideranças do ISIS de apoiar os rebeldes sírios coloca o grupogeograficamente próximo ao Iraque cujo governo xiita tem discriminado sua população sunita. Esta, então, tende a ver os jihadistas com certa simpatia. Além disto, fazendo causa comum com os rebeldes que desejam a queda do ditador sírio Assad, o ISIS se fortalece,levantando uma bandeira que não necessariamente tem a ver com o fundamentalismo religioso mas que, no momento atual, granjeia diversos apoios. O sucesso do grupo na região e sua eventual chegada a um poder, ainda que parcial, na Síria ou no Iraque, onde játomou territórios, poderá conduzir à consolidação do sunismo em sua vertente mais radicale, numa etapa seguinte, a um estrito controle não apenas político mas de comportamentosdos próprios sunitas moderados.

Uma das vozes mais lúcidas no Iraque tem sido a do Grande Aiatolá Ali al-Husayni al-Sistanique no passado foi duramente perseguido pelos sunitas no governo de Saddam Hussein. Al-Sistani pertence à corrente denominada “quietista” do xiismo, com pouco envolvimento em assuntos políticos, mas tem insistido na necessidade de que o Iraque impeça o avanço do ISIS em suas fronteiras, o que o grupo vem fazendo a partir de suas bases na Síria. Eleargumenta que a luta contra o ISIS deve ser de todos e não apenas dos xiitas pois o projeto do califado levará ao fim das nacionalidades e consequentemente do Iraque como país.Como pode ser visto na versão eletrônica do jornal libanês Daily Star, o ISIS distribuiu fotos mostrando sua ação nas fronteiras da Síria e do Iraque, sob o título de Smashing the Sykes-Picot border, uma clara contestação das fronteiras do Oriente Médio (Daily Star, 2014). Al Sistani conclamou a população a se unir contra este tipo de agressão que, segundo ele, coloca em risco a independência do país que é múltiplo tanto do ponto de vista religioso quanto étnico. De acordo com suas próprias palavras: “Nossa chamada [à luta contra o ISIS] foi para todos os iraquianos e não para uma seita particular [a dos xiitas]” (NPR, 2014).

O atual governo iraquiano do Primeiro Ministro Nuri al-Maliki, porém, não tem dialogado comos demais grupos do país e são constantes as críticas da parte de curdos, de árabes sunitas, de cristãos e até mesmo de outros xiitas. A brigada Mahdi, criada pelo clérigoMuqtada al-Sadr em 2003, e que enfrentou as forças americanas após a invasão, está entre os que não confiam em al-Maliki, declarando que combaterá os jihadistas sunitas mas sem nenhuma associação com o atual governo.

Com o avanço do ISIS no norte e oeste do Iraque e com a tomada de Mosul, a segunda maior cidade do país, estratégica em virtude de seus poços de petróleo, os jihadistas passaram a ameaçar diretamente as populações curdas e cristãs. O líder curdo Massoud Barzani declarou, no dia 27 de junho, que não pretende abrir mão do controle de Kirkuk,uma rica cidade multiétnica que os curdos, graças às suas bem equipadas forças militares, conseguiram defender dos violentos ataques do ISIS (Daily News, 2014). No rastro, portanto, destes enfrentamentos, os curdos do Iraque reafirmaram sua autonomia e se posicionaram de modo a deixar claro seu peso estratégico e político. Bem organizados e acostumados a viver em prontidão, são essenciais na defesa das fronteiras do norte do país, e o primeiro ministro al-Maliki ou qualquer outro governo que o suceda, não poderáprescindir de seu auxilio.

Vali Nasr, analista atento das questões sectárias no Oriente Médio já se referiu, antes mesmo da emergência do ISIS, à difícil situação que se delineava no Iraque com aascensão ao poder dos xiitas, majoritários no país. Para Nasr, durante a fase inicial de reestruturação após a derrubada de Saddam, os grupos xiitas consideraram o novo Estado como o “seu estado” enquanto para os sunitas, as forças de segurança que estavam se organizando eram xiitas, e não nacionais. Os confrontos foram frequentes e as divergências sectárias se mantiveram constantes (Nasr, 2006).

Com tantos conflitos, não é de se admirar que o ISIS tire partido da situação para fomentar o desmembramento do Iraque, o que servirá a seu propósito de enfraquecer sentimentosnacionais que possam se sobrepor à ideia do califado. No entanto, como o grupo jihadistaameaça outros poderes também sunitas, como a Jordânia, a Arábia Saudita e a Turquia, é possível que se aperte o cerco a ele, com apoios heterogêneos em torno do inimigo comum.

Os Estados Unidos continuam, ainda que de forma limitada, a auxiliar os rebeldes da Síria e apostam na possibilidade de que os grupos moderados venham a derrubar Assad. Trata-se, porém, de um cálculo perigoso que pode levar à abertura de mais espaço para o ISIS dentro do país. A Turquia teme a fragmentação do Iraque e o fortalecimento das reivindicações independentistas curdas nas suas fronteiras. O crescimento do fundamentalismo interno também é motivo de preocupação na sociedade turca e um hipotético retorno ao califado questionará, em última análise, todo o seu processo de modernização no decorrer do século XX, bem como sua aproximação com a Europa. Quanto aos xiitas iranianos e iraquianos, sua preocupação maior é o crescimento do terrorismo jihadista por parte dos sunitas radicais que atacam com muita frequência

mesquitas e outros lugares sagrados do xiismo.

Entre as informações mais recentes chegadas da região está a de que o atual governo do Iraque, embora alinhado aos americanos, começa a demonstrar simpatia pelas ações de Assad no combate ao ISIS. Al-Maliki declarou ao BBC’s Arabic Service que apoia os ataquesaéreos que o governo sírio realiza na fronteira entre o Iraque e a Síria (BBC, 2014).

Neste contexto, o que se pode esperar, no Iraque, é o acirramento da violência sectária, e na Síria, o fortalecimento de Assad que cada vez mais contará com o apoio dos xiitas iranianos e mesmo iraquianos, como al-Maliki já sinalizou. Quanto ao Irã, este pode se beneficiar de um certo alívio das pressões norte-americanas na medida em que se torne um ator importante para conter a agressiva expansão do ISIS.

Nas próximas semanas deve haver uma recomposição de forças que inclua diversos países na tentativa de assegurar as fronteiras iraquianas mas também de impedir que o grupo fundamentalista se apodere de todas as ações contra Assad. Os Estados Unidos continuam fornecendo alguma ajuda aos rebeldes sírios moderados, o que, no entanto, talvez já seja um pouco tarde dada a considerável infiltração do radicalismo do ISIS no país. No Iraque, é possível que se tente um governo de união nacional e al-Maliki poderá ter dificuldades para se manter no poder, já que desagrada não apenas a curdos e sunitas mas também a diversos grupos xiitas, tendo recusado por diversas vezes o pedido de um encontro da parte do respeitado aiatolá Sistani. São muitas as mudanças que podem ocorrer e é difícil fazer previsões de médio prazo para um conflito de tamanha complexidade. A única certeza é a de que o atual equilíbrio de forças na região dificilmente se manterá por muito tempo semalterações significativas.

Referências:

BBC, June, 27, 2014, Disponível em: [www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28033684] Acesso em: 27/06/2014.

DAILY NEWS, June, 27, 2014. Disponível em: [http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2014/Jun-27/261832] Acesso em: 2/06/2014

DAILY STAR, June, 27, 2014. Disponível em: [www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2014/Jun-27/261767-despite-jihadist-drive-mideast-colonial-borders-seen-intact.ashx#axzz35nR98S7O] Acesso em: 27/06/2014

NASR, Vali (2006). The Shia Revival. New York; W.W. Norton, p.202.

NPR, June, 24, 2014, Disponível em: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/06/24/325169087/ ] Acesso em: 26/06/2014.

Carmen Lícia Palazzo é Doutora em História pela Universidade de Brasília -mUnB, Pesquisadora associada do Centro Universitário de Brasília – UniCeub, Consultora do PEJ/UnB e Pesquisadora do Grupo Officium da Universidade Federal da Paraíba – UFPB (carmenlicia@gmail.com).

Venezuela: o socialismo do seculo XIX retoma seu curso, a penuria - ElPais/Bloomberg

Los venezolanos se agolpan en la reapertura de las tiendas de Zara El Pais Economia / by Bloomberg, 27/06/2014

Unas 300 personas se agolparon la semana pasada en el exterior de la tienda de Zara del centro comercial Sambil, en Caracas, para comprar ropa. El motivo de tanta expectación no era el estreno de una nueva colección, si no la reapertura del establecimiento, cerrado por la falta de género ante las dificultades del propietario para importar productos por elcontrol de divisas impuesto por el Gobierno.
Zara pudo reanudar la actividad después de que el Gobierno de Nicolás Maduro garantizara a las franquicias de Inditex en el país el acceso a la divisa local a una tasa preferencial. Esta medida supuso descuentos de hasta un 85% para los clientes. Pero nadie sabe cuánto tiempo durará la ropa. Celestina Aponte, abogada de 23 años, llegó a decir en el trabajo que estaba enferma para tener la oportunidad de comprar a precios más asequibles que los habituales. "No he comprado nada este año porque todo es demasiado caro", dijo Aponte, quien se gastó 10.000 bolívares en blusas y pantalones, el equivalente a unos 137 dólares en el mercadonegro o unos 943 dólares al tipo de cambio preferencial. "Hay que hacer cola durante horas para comprar leche y harina de maíz. Y ahora también para comprarse unos pantalones", añadió.

Escasez de bienes de consumo

La situación refleja las dificultades que están sufriendo los comercios enVenezuela, donde una economía caótica ha provocado la escasez en todos los ámbitos y productos, hasta de papel higiénico y medicamentos, y a unainflación anual del 61%, la más alta del mundo.
Phoenix Comercio Mundial, la compañía que dirige la franquicia de Zara enVenezuela, fue incapaz de importar ropa durante el último año ya que no pudo adquirir divisa extranjera para pagar a sus proveedores. El presidente del grupo, Camilo Ibrahim, confirmó por correo electronico que su empresa acaba de acceder, tras meses de negociaciones con el Gobierno, almercado de divisas Sicad I, que ofrece dólares a una tasa preferencial. Esatasa ronda los 10,6 bolívares por dólar, un cambio que contrasta con los 73 del mercado negro.
Eso sí, a cambio del acuerdo, la compañía de franquicias accedió a limitarsus márgenes de beneficio después de que una agencia gubernamentalrevisara sus precios y costes. Tras el pacto, Phoenix Comercio Mundialpudo, poco a poco, volver a abrir algunas de las 25 tiendas que dirige enVenezuela bajo las marcas de Inditex —lo que lo convierte en el tercer país latinoamericano en cuanto a número de establecimientos del grupo español—.

Tiendas vacías

"El problema comenzó porque no había un sistema de tipo de cambio legaly eficiente que nos permitiera pagar a los proveedores", explicó Ibrahim."Debido a esto, a mediados de 2012 fuimos incapaces de importar mercancías, con lo que las tiendas se quedaron vacías a finales de 2013 y durante buena parte de 2014", comentó.
Venezuela ha mantenido estrictos controles de divisas desde 2003 y utilizauna tasa oficial de 6,3 bolívares por dólar para la importación de artículos de primera necesidad, como los productos alimenticios y los medicamentos. La tasa Sicad I se emplea para las importaciones"prioritarias", como piezas de automóviles, productos químicos, material escolar, y, a partir de ahora, también para la ropa.
El pasado mes de marzo, el Ejecutivo de Maduro introdujo un segundomercado alternativo conocido como Sicad II y enfocado a la venta de dólares para las importaciones de bienes no esenciales, a una tasa de unos 50 bolívares por dólar.

Economía tambaleante

Los pagos a los importadores de alimentos y a las compañías farmacéuticas empezaron a fallar a raíz de la decisión del Gobierno de devaluar el bolívar y reducir la oferta de dólares para el sector privado. El año pasado, la divisa venezolana perdió el 56% de su valor en el mercadonegro, un cambio que muchos almacenes emplean como referencia para fijar los precios.
Los sectores de ropa y calzado recibieron 370 millones de dólares durante los primeros cuatro meses del año con el cambio fijado en la tasa Sicad I,según los cálculos que maneja Henkel García, director de la consultoraEconométrica, con sede en Caracas. "El Gobierno de Venezuela está dando a la moda el mismo peso que da al sector de atención a la salud",dijo García. "La gente está haciendo cola porque es más barato y porque sabe que que la ropa va a desaparecer", comentó.
"Las mercancías a estos precios probablemente se agoten en dos o tressemanas", comentó Alfredo Cohen, presidente de la asociación nacional decentros comerciales. Añadió que espera que las tiendas de ropa sean cambiadas al Sicad II, menos preferencial, y que después "la actividadcomercial vuelva a la normalidad".
La tienda de Bershka en Caracas tiene mejores precios que los ofrecidos por los vendedores locales, según comentó Carolina Pérez, de 21 años."Pude comprar tres blusas por 1.000 bolívares, cuando con ese dinero los vendedores ambulantes solo me dan una", dijo. "Llástima que no pude encontrar ningunos vaqueros", lamentó.

Límites en las compras

Los compradores, por su parte, están intentando aprovecharse de la situación en la medida de sus posibilidades. Gimi Lata, de 31 años, se acercó a un comercio de Zara en Caracas a las seis de la mañana junto asus hermanos, su esposa y su bebé de nueve meses, porque la tiendalimita las ventas a seis artículos por persona, explicó.
Zoila Gutiérrez, un ama de casa de 42 años, fue una de las 300 personas que hicieron cola para acceder al Zara del centro comercial Sambil la semana pasada. Dijo que si hubieran repartido "solo" 200 números más, hubiera conseguido entrar. "Estamos dispuestos a pasar aquí todo el díapara aprovechar la oportunidad", aseguró ante la atenta mirada de los guardias que custodiaban la entrada a la tienda.
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E aqui, uma ironia involuntária:
Novo apagão na Venezuela interrompe discurso de Maduro - Internacional - Notícia - VEJA.com
http://veja.abril.com.br/noticia/internacional/apagao-atinge-15-estados-da-venezuela-e-interrompe-discurso-de-maduro

A Grande Guerra: os Balcans mudaram depois? - John F. Burns (NYT)

In Sarajevo, Divisions That Drove an Assassin Have Only Begun to Heal

John F. burns

The New York Times, June 26, 2014

Nationalist and sectarian passions continue to haunt Bosnia, which was ravaged by a civil war just two decades ago and is even now the scene of dueling efforts to define Gavrilo Princip’s legacy.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — As the 100th anniversary approaches, the clusters of visitors have thickened at the street-corner museum in Sarajevo’s old town that stands where Gavrilo Princip claimed his place in history on June 28, 1914, firing the shots that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, and setting off World War I.

But for all the excited chatter among the tourists on the sidewalk where the 19-year-old Princip fired his Browning semiautomatic pistol, killing the 50-year-old heir to the Hapsburg throne and his pregnant consort, there is a pervasive ordinariness in the setting. Little about it conveys the enormity of the assassination and its aftermath: the major European powers and their allies — Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires — marching in lock step into war.

In the centenary commemorations in Sarajevo, culminating on Saturday with a concert in the old city hall, peace is the official theme. But the ethnic and nationalist divisions that motivated Princip are anything but history in this part of the world, which was ravaged only two decades ago by bloody sectarian fighting and is even now the scene of dueling efforts to define Princip’s legacy. As Europe diligently promotes an ideology of harmony, broad areas of the continent, the Middle East and elsewhere continue to struggle with versions of the destructive forces unleashed that day.

“To me, what is happening across Bosnia today, and what is happening in many other parts of the world, is very much like the beginning of the 20th century,” said Vera Katz, a scholar at the University of Sarajevo’s History Institute. “Seeing how some of our communities have made Princip into a mythical figure has made me think that we have hardly moved on at all.”

The archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began, with a conspirator tossing a homemade bomb from a bridge over the Miljacka River. It bounced off the folded canopy of the archduke’s car before exploding.

What ensued stands as a monument to imperial folly and to the role of chance and mischance in history. Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day’s formalities through. With the archduke in a military tunic and helmet, and the duchess in a dress of white filigreed lace with a matching hat and parasol, they headed back along the lightly guarded Miljacka embankment — and, 500 yards on, to their fateful encounter with Princip.

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A mural at Andricgrad — a model village in Visegrad, Bosnia, based on old Serb traditions — depicts the archduke's assassin, Gavrilo Princip, and his fellow conspirators.

 Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The sepia photographs in glass cases at the museum show Princip as a slight, whispery-mustached man with staring eyes, otherwise forgettable in his homespun jacket and collarless shirt. Raised in a poor family in northwest Bosnia, he was one of a group of Serbian conspirators — members of a revolutionary nationalist group, Young Bosnia — lurking among the cheering crowds.

He told the Sarajevo court empaneled hastily to try him and his fellow conspirators that he had lost hope of killing the couple and retreated into a corner delicatessen, now the museum. But then a wrong turn by the archduke’s driver and the lack of a reverse gear forced security men to push the car out of the narrow street, presenting Princip his victims at close range.

A century later, Bosnia’s Serbs, Muslims and Croats remain deeply divided in their attitudes toward Princip. Many Serbs view him as a heroic fighter against Austro-Hungarian rule — on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia, which emerged from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and disintegrated amid the resurgent nationalist and sectarian passions of the 1990s.

Continue reading the main story

1910

1922

POLAND

AUSTRIA

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

HUNGARY

ROMANIA

ROMANIA

YUGOSLAVIA

SERBIA

Sarajevo

Sarajevo

BULGARIA

BULGARIA

ITALY

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OTTOMAN EMPIRE

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200 MILES

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Among the largely Catholic Croats and some Bosnian Muslims, many of whom looked to the authorities in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs, it is more common to condemn Princip as an anarchist or terrorist, as the Sarajevo court did when it sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment. He died of tuberculosis, proud and unrepentant, in a Hungarian prison in 1918.

So it is small wonder that the centenary has revived the passions that made Bosnia a hotbed of violence in both world wars and again in the 1990s. In the last conflict, a vote by Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992 to secede from Yugoslavia set off a civil war with Serbs in which about 110,000 people were killed, including more than 11,500 under artillery siege in Sarajevo, according to records compiled since the war.

Inevitably, the ghost of Princip has been exhumed as part of the newly embittered debate. It has been only a few years since he found a peace of his own in St. Mark Cemetery in the heart of Sarajevo, where a mausoleum built for him and 10 of his fellow conspirators under Yugoslav rule was desecrated in the 1990s, then restored by the Serbian Orthodox keepers of the cemetery.

Archduke Francis Ferdinand Is Assassinated

The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Serbian nationalist set off a series of events that led to the start of World War I. See full article in TimesMachine

The New York Herald

As a result of the political tug of war, commemorations of the assassination, like so much else in Bosnia, have been divided along sectarian lines. Serb hard-liners have chosen to boycott events financed by the European Union in favor of their own ceremonies, complete with new statues and mosaics of Princip and speeches and banquets in his honor. These alternative events are being held in parts of the country assigned to Serb control in the American-sponsored Dayton peace accords of 1995, which ended that decade’s conflict.

The concert, which will be broadcast live in 40 countries, is the centerpiece of a two-week program of conferences, concerts, poetry readings, plays and sporting performances whose organizers are determined not to take sides in the Princip dispute.

The commemorations — sponsored by France and Austria, along with other European governments and $2.5 million from the European Union — have involved an element of historical amnesia. In 1914, France was, with Russia, the closest ally of Serbia: the newly independent nation that Princip saw as the linchpin of a new order in the Balkans, one that would unite all Balkan Serbs in a “greater Serbia” once the colonial hold of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans had been broken.

Modern-day Austria and Hungary, with their strong historical sympathies for the murdered couple, emerged from the breakup of the Hapsburg empire codified by the Treaty of Versailles, which reset the map of Europe and the Middle East after World War I.

Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense of the benefits of a shared political life, and away from the political paralysis that has characterized Bosnia since the Dayton agreement.

That accord, which ended the 1990s blood bath, gave Bosnia a multilayered political structure, with more than a dozen governmental and parliamentary bodies — all elected on sectarian lines, and all now tottering under the weight of endemic corruption and fierce personal rivalries.

Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe. It has an official youth unemployment rate nearing 50 percent and an economy that is still 20 percent smaller than it was when the fighting broke out here in 1992. Hundreds of thousands of refugees remain scattered across Europe, wide areas of the country are virtually depopulated, and tens of thousands of homes are still abandoned and in ruins. Seething popular discontent led to days of protests and rioting this year, including the firebombing of government buildings in Sarajevo and other cities.

After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union — a status Croatia has already achieved and Serbia is nearing. “The eyes of the world will be focused on Sarajevo once more,” Mr. Komsic said, “and it is important that we send messages completely different from the messages of war we sent in 1914 and 1992.”

Many Bosnians of all creeds say the country has already turned that corner. What is impeding the building of a modern, multidenominational state, they say, are the narrow-minded, sectarian politicians empowered by the Dayton accords, and not the ancient hatreds limned by the Nobel Prize-winning author Ivo Andric in his oft-quoted “Letter From 1920.” In it, he described the depth of “tenderness and loving passion” among the people of Sarajevo, but wrote, “In secret depths underneath all this hide burning hatreds, entire hurricanes of tethered and compressed hatreds maturing and awaiting their hour.”

To a reporter returning to Sarajevo for the first time since the siege of the early 1990s, the evidence of a new beginning is palpable. Even in driving rain, bars and restaurants are packed past midnight, laughter seems contagious, and joy at the achievement of the Bosnian soccer team in reaching the World Cup in Brazil seems boundless — and not only among Muslims and Croats, whose communities account for a majority of the players. When shells and mortars were falling in the 1990s and Serb artillery batteries were targeting bread and water lines, hospitals and schools, it seemed chimerical to think the city would ever prosper again.

Against this, there are the unresolved animosities among sectarian hard-liners, including some who are involved in the parallel centenary commemorations. Among them is the Sarajevo-born film director Emir Kusturica, 59, who is of Muslim descent but converted to Serbian Orthodoxy after the turmoil of the 1990s. He is the driving force behind ceremonies honoring Princip that will be held on a peninsula jutting into the Drina River at Visegrad, about 70 miles from Sarajevo on the border between Bosnia and Serbia.

Visegrad, whose population was once two-thirds Muslim, is overwhelmingly Serb now. It suffered some of the worst Serb atrocities, including mass rapes and incinerations of whole families locked into burning homes, in the first months of “ethnic cleansing” in eastern Bosnia in 1992. As part of a bid to regenerate the town, Mr. Kusturica has overseen the construction of a $20 million model village, Andricgrad, based on old Serb traditions. It is there that the most elaborate ceremonies for Princip will be held, in the presence of leaders from Serbia.

Mr. Kusturica’s case for Princip is that political assassinations have been common drivers of history, and that Westerners who condemn Princip but supported the hanging of Saddam Hussein or the mob killing of Muammar el-Qaddafi are hypocrites.

“Gavrilo Princip was our national pride, a revolutionary who helped us to get rid of slavery,” he told visitors from Sarajevo as some 200 workers hastened about under a mosaic of Princip and his fellow conspirators, putting the final touches on the village. “Bosnia and Herzegovina was the last European colony on Slav soil, and what he did on June 28, 1914, was a blow for our liberation.”

A Grande Guerra que mudou o mundo: e se o arquiduque nao tivesse morrido? - Simon Winder (NYT)

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived

By SIMON WINDER - New York Times,JUNE 27, 2014

FOR over 25 years, Archduke Franz Ferdinand paced up and down in his palaces and castles waiting impatiently for the death of the ever more ancient emperor, his hated uncle Franz Joseph I. As we all know, his wait was in vain.

Of this summer’s great anniversary commemorations of World War I, the most important will be those marking the assassination on June 28, 1914 of Franz Ferdinand, the “original sin” from which all the terrible subsequent events followed. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne has come to symbolize everything backward and myopic about pre-1914 Europe. With his ostrich-feather hat, medaled bulk and waxed mustache, he was a sitting duck for a young radical with a cheap semiautomatic. In his apparent archaism, no leader could contrast more with the horrific modernity of his eventual postwar inheritor: the young Adolf Hitler, a gaunt Everyman with a toothbrush mustache and a raincoat.

In the public perception of history, Franz Ferdinand is thought to have had a mere walk-on role. But that is a measure of how low the Hapsburg empire had fallen. In an early-20th-century world of exuberant American and Russian expansion, of Britain and France as global colonial powers and of the newly united nations of Germany and Italy, the Hapsburg empire seemed ever more marginal. And yet the challenges and opportunities of the empire — encompassing a huge region, widely varied terrain, all of Europe’s religions and a dizzying variety of languages — are still relevant today. Franz Ferdinand was heir to an entity which now forms all or part of 12 modern states. Somehow, despite linguistic and religious disputes that could result in riots and legislative gridlock, it worked.

Following a deal in 1867, the empire had been split into two giant pieces, one ruled by German speakers in Vienna, the other by Magyar speakers in Budapest. Both groups formed large minorities in their own halves and had to ride wave after wave of nationalist agitation. The German speakers were distracted by the mesmerizing existence of Otto von Bismarck’s Germany on their doorstep; and it was in Vienna that both modern anti-Semitism and the logical Jewish response, Theodor Herzl’s Zionism, were created. The Magyar speakers were isolated by their language, and rule over their half was spent in a frantic but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to “Magyarize” the other nationalities — a battle that was played out bitterly across schools, churches and armies.

How to rationalize this Tower of Babel was Franz Ferdinand’s great preoccupation. The Hapsburgs had many cards to play and there was no sense in 1914 that their empire was reaching its end. Indeed, it was not until 1918 that the Allies decided the empire would be broken up. It was only the war’s years of grinding attrition that so radicalized all the combatants that any weapon — even the unleashing of chaotic minor nationalisms — seemed worth using.

There were many possibilities before 1914. One ingenious proposal was for a United States of Austria, which would have carved the empire into a series of federal language-based states, including small urban enclaves to protect (but also isolate) German speakers. This could have been achieved only by the destruction of Magyar imperialism, but Franz Ferdinand at different points seems to have seen this as worth risking. The archduke also toyed with universal suffrage, knowing that the threat alone might keep the Magyar and German minorities in line.

We will never know if such schemes might have worked. But these are ghosts that have haunted Europe ever since — possibilities whose disappearance unleashed evils inconceivable in the stuffy, hypocritical, but relatively decent and orderly world of the Hapsburg empire.

Its destruction in 1918 proved a universal disaster. The Hapsburg rulers might have been shortsighted, cynical and incompetent, but they ruled over a paradise compared to the horrors that followed. The successor states were desperately weak, and almost all contained fractions of those minorities that had caused the Hapsburgs such problems.

Most became vicious dictatorships; and even the least offensive, Czechoslovakia, contained a partly alienated German minority that would play a central role in the outbreak of the next world war. The fates of the countries of the former empire, as they fell into the hands first of Hitler and then of Stalin, represented nightmarish “solutions” to the challenge of multinational rule, solutions based on genocide, class war and mass expulsions of kinds unimaginable in 1914.

There were many reasons Franz Ferdinand was the perfect target for the Serbian-sponsored terrorists of 1914. They knew that his plans for reform within the empire were a profound threat to them. And in symbolic terms, he was ideal.

But what they could not have known was that Franz Ferdinand was probably the most senior antiwar figure in Central Europe, a man acutely aware of Hapsburg weakness, scathing about the delusions of his generals and a close friend of the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. The recklessness and stupidity of the Hapsburg response to the assassination — the ultimatum of humiliating demands served on Serbia, a response so crucial to the outbreak of the World War I — would not have occurred in the face of some other provocative outrage that had left Franz Ferdinand alive.

For those who had been living in the shelter of the Hapsburg empire, the shooting initiated a catastrophe that ended only with the conclusion of the Cold War. The shadow of this vanished empire continues to hang over Europe, and the assassination’s centenary must, for many millions of Europeans, be viewed as a truly solemn event.

Simon Winder is the author, most recently, of “Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 28, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived.