Macroscópio
Por José Manuel Fernandes, Publisher
Boa noite!
De vez em quando a História parece que acelera e 1979 foi um daqueles anos em que isso pareceu acontecer. O que na altura não se percebeu foi em que direcção, pois à primeira vista os ventos sopravam a favor das revoluções, e todas as revoluções pareciam entusiasmar – mesmo quando não se sabia bem onde conduziriam. Basta recordar que 1979 abriu com a revolução iraniana – que recordaremos neste Macroscópio – e fechou com a invasão soviética do Afeganistão. Pelo meio ainda aconteceu a vitória sandinista na Nicarágua (onde hoje um regime herdeiro desses dias se agarra ao poder) e o surpreendente ataque terrorista à Grande Mesquita de Meca. Poucos deram então importância à chegada ao poder de Margaret Thatcher, à primeira visita à Polónia de um recém-eleito João Paulo II e à escolha para o Politburo do Partido Comunista da União Soviética de um desconhecido Gorbachev, mas seria na sua direcção que, na década seguinte, os ventos da História soprariam. Com excepção porventura da revolução iraniana que foi saudada por muitos como sendo um levantamento anti-imperialista (mais um, e mais um a culminar a década da saída americana da Indochina), mas se revelaria como a primeira revolução islâmica, profundamente anti-moderna. Com ela abriram-se novas frentes de conflito de que ainda não saímos e marcam o nosso tempo, pelo que se justifica revisitá-la, quatro décadas passadas.
De facto, como recorda Ishaan Tharoor em 40 years later, the many legacies of Iran’s revolution no Washington Post, “The Iranian revolution played a significant role in the birth and the growth of the jihadist movements in the Arab World, as it raised the awareness of the role of religion in political change in the region,” Adnan Milhem, a Palestinian historian, said to the Associated Press. “The Iranian revolution affected the political thinking in the region in terms of introducing religion as a changing tool to fight oppression and corruption.” Critics of Tehran blame it for all the ills of recent years — the deadly sectarianism inflaming the Middle East, the radicalism fueling its insurgencies.”
Pode-se efectivamente discutir até onde vai a responsabilidade de Teerão no crescendo do radicalismo islâmico, até porque há outros protagonistas e o milenar cisma entre xiitas e sunitas, mas para pelo menos um país tudo passou a ser muito diferente a partir do dia em que os ayatollahs tomaram conta do poder na velha Pérsia. Falo de Israel. Natan Sachs, diretor do Center for Middle East Policy da Brookings Institution faz uma boa análise dessa nova realidade em Iran’s Revolution, 40 Years On: Israel’s Reverse Periphery Doctrine, um texto onde começa por recordar que, para o estado judaico, a política externa “Early in the state’s existence, took the form of the “periphery doctrine“: first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s attempt to forge an alliance with non-Arab (yet mostly Muslim) countries in the Middle East as a counter-balance to the Arab states. Chief among these non-Arab partners were Turkey and pre-revolution Iran, countries who had (then) a common orientation toward the West and their own reasons to feel isolated in the Middle East.” Ora, como sabemos, “Today no country (...) embodies threat to Israelis as does the Islamic Republic. Iran’s nuclear program appears to most Israelis to be an existential threat. The nuclear question and Iran’s extensive proxy operations in the Arab world have shaped Israel’s foreign policy in recent years and driven much of its actions on the global stage. Iran has become a near-singular focus of Israeli leaders and planners, identifying Iran’s hand in nearly every direction, and often with cause.”
Este analista também refere que se “Forty years ago, a domestic revolution in Iran transformed the Middle East as far as the Mediterranean. Domestic change in Iran could transform it again.” Só que ninguém sabe se essa mudança está para ocorrer ou pode mesmo ocorrer, apesar do regime ser hoje tudo menos popular. Porque falhou economicamente e porque a sociedade evoluiu. A dimensão do fiasco económico é bem evidente quando comparamos a evolução da economia iraniana com as de outros países em desenvolvimento, como faz David Rosenberg, do Hareetz, em How 40 Years of Mullah-nomics Have Failed Iran: “In 1977, the last normal year for pre-revolutionary Iran before mass protests broke out, its economy was 25% bigger than Turkey's. Four decades later, Turkey’s GDP is 2.4 times that of Iran. Forty years ago, Iran's economy was 65% bigger than South Korea’s economy. Now South Korea's economy is 7.2 times bigger than Iran's. Looking at Vietnam, in 1977 its economy was 70% the size of Iran’s. Today it's nearly five times bigger. Regime apologists often stress that Iran’s per capita GDP more than doubled from 1980 to 2018, but that’s not particularly impressive: in that time, Turkey’s economy grew five-fold, and South Korea's by19 times.” Um retrato igualmente critico é traçado por Sanam Vakil, da Chatham House, no podcast da BBC Iran's Revolution 40 Years On.
Já Edward N. Luttwak traça um retrato mais fino do que corre mal na economia na revista judaica Tablet – que tem um magnífico dossier dedicado à revolução iraniana com muitos outros artigos interessantes –, e digo mais fino porque foca o problema da corrupção. Em The Ayatollah Empire Is Rotting Away conta-nos como “Regime clerics steal everything, including the pistachio nuts”. Um exemplo, entre muitos: “The Supreme Leader Khamenei himself is not known to have personally stolen anything—he has his official palaces, after all. But his second son, Mojtaba, may have taken as much as $2 billion from the till, while his third son, Massoud, is making do with a mere 400- or 500-hundred million. His youngest son, Maitham, is not living in poverty either, with a couple of hundred million. The ayatollah’s two daughters, Bushra and Huda, each received de-facto dowries in the $100 million range. This shows that the regime is headed by devoted family men who lovingly look after their many children, for whom only the best will do. It also cuts into the theoretical $6,000 income per Iranian head, because some “heads” are taking a thousand times as much and more.”
Dos outros artigos deste dossier seleccionei também Why They Stay, dedicado a uma realidade muito pouco conhecida: a dos judeus que optaram por ficar no Irão mesmo depois da revolução islâmica. Neste texto Roya Hakakian conta-nos como vivem uma vida que mistura horror e esperança e que é, de certa forma, também um retrato da vida das classes mais educadas do país. Muito interessante: “In the diaspora, Iranian Jews, who distance themselves from the clerics by identifying as “Persians,” remain devoted to their heritage so unapologetically that they frequently draw the ire of American Jews. They insist on praying in their own synagogues, for they wish to speak Persian and conduct services as they had in the past. On social media, they have created numerous communities, where they share recipes and other memorabilia to ease the pangs of nostalgia.” Mais: “Forty years since the 1979 revolution nothing has changed, and yet everything has. The supreme leader is still in power, but the nation has turned away from him. Iran is still an Islamic republic, yet Iranians increasingly identify themselves, like many American Jews, as a secular people. Iran is the regional theocracy, and yet it is the only country where political Islam is no longer a utopian aspiration. Nowhere else is the clergy, once so venerated, now so suspect, if not dangerously despised.”
Thomas Erdbrink, que vive em Teerão, relata no New York Times, em The Iran Revolution at 40: From Theocracy to ‘Normality’, essa espécie de vida dupla, onde às vezes se dão pequenos passos, outras vezes ocorrem enormes recuos impostos pela repressão: “Instagram, which is not blocked in Iran, has revolutionized the way Iranians view themselves. The photo-sharing app has been a major driver of change in a country where everything was hidden. When I moved here in 2002, photos were still taken on film, and we had to be careful because they would be developed in a lab where someone might see something that could cause problems. But when I recently added one of my neighbors as a friend, I could see her without a scarf, at parties, having fun. The walls that long divided the private and public in Iran have been broken down, with Iranians using the streets in the way they like. Politics in Iran are a different story. There was the Green Revolution of 2009, when people rose up to protest what many saw as a fraudulent election. But that was violently suppressed, and the group of people making the decisions has remained largely unchanged over the years, even narrowing some. Yet after allowing so many social taboos to slip, Iran’s leaders face a growing dilemma of whether to start translating the social changes into new laws and customs or try to hang on to the 40-year-old ideals of the revolution.”
No Washinton Post Jason Rezaian analisa as hipóteses de uma mudança mais profunda, mais estrutural, em At 40, Iran’s decaying Islamic Republic is showing its age, e a sua conclusão não é lá muito optimista. Primeiro, porque é preciso não esquecer como o obscurantismo dos mullahs se impôs: “This ruthless approach went against the natural inclinations of one of the Middle East’s most educated and sophisticated societies. But the regime remained viable because of an unspoken understanding: It subsidized a standard of living replete with nearly free access to utilities, basic food sources, medical care, education. These resources weren’t the best in the world, but they weren’t too shabby, either. People improved their lives where and how they could. When the opportunity presented itself, many left for life abroad.” Depois, que a vida dupla que muitos levam ainda é confortável: “What resulted from this hypocrisy was a society that was publicly pliant but defiant behind closed doors. As long as the petrodollars flowed, it was an easy situation to control.”
Só que, por este caminho, o Irão vai continuar a ficar para trás, a não conseguir acompanhar os países com quem se comparava, e ultrapassava, há quatro décadas. É isso mesmo que se sublinhou na The Economist, em Four decades after its revolution, Iran is still stuck in the past: “The public long ago lost its revolutionary zeal. More than 150,000 educated Iranians are thought to leave the country each year, among the world’s highest rates of brain drain. Younger Iranians attend mosque less frequently than their parents did. “People laugh at all the nonsense the mullahs are telling them,” says Darioush Bayandor, a former Iranian diplomat. Yet the regime acts as if the revolution were only yesterday. The judiciary recently banned walking dogs in public (Islam deems dogs impure). This month Mr Khamenei scolded women who remove their hijabs. “That captures the essence of Islamist rule in Iran: Dogmatic septuagenarian clerics forcing their own antiquated views on a young, diverse society,” writes Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. “It can only be sustained through coercion.” O resultado é que “Daily protests continue in Iran, as the economy sinks. “America is not the enemy, the enemy is right here,” say some in the crowds. Hatred for the shah united Iranians behind Khomeini. Today, though, the opposition is disparate and leaderless. Iranians look around their region and see only failed uprisings. The revolution of 1979 has brought mostly misery, but another one is probably not in the offing.”
Ao contrário da Revolução de Outubro, que tinha uma mensagem que se pretendia universal, a Revolução Iraniana transportou consigo uma mensagem sectária mas capaz de contagiar fiéis em todo o mundo. Não se circunscreveu por isso às fronteiras históricas da Pérsia, antes viajou, por vezes em coletes-bomba, à volta do globo. $0 anos depois ainda olhamos para Teerão – até por recear que um dia aí se venha a dispor da arma nuclear.
Tenham boas leituras.
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