On September 14, 2022, Iranian journalist exiled in France since 2010 Aïda Ghajar revealed, with supporting photos, that Mahsa Amini was in a coma in a hospital in Tehran, after her arrest by the morality police. From October 2022, Aïda Ghajar, 40, dedicates herself body and soul to a subject that she covers for the media IranWire from abroad: the systemic, repeated and intentional use of projectiles targeted at the eyes of protesters during protests in the streets of Iran. Over several months, she collected around a hundred testimonies from victims who were now blind, which she shared in a long report to explain and denounce this modus operandi. Interview.
RFI: How did you become interested in this subject of the blindness of demonstrators in Iran?
Aida Ghajar: It dates back to the end of October, in 2022. One of my sources among my network on site in Iran contacted me to tell me that a young girl had lost her eyes during a demonstration. I knew that this way of targeting the eyes was a weapon already used in other countries, but it was one of the first times that I had been alerted to this subject in Iran. So I called this young woman. She told me her story: she was arrested in the first week of protests after the death of Mahsa Amini. She remained in prison for ten days and then, once released, she immediately returned to demonstrate.
In October, she took a paintball, a kinetic impact projectile, in the eye. She then sent me photos of her face and all her medical documents, which I then forwarded to our network of doctors in Iran for them to look at, verify and give their opinion. The conclusion confirmed that the injury was caused by a paintball.
I quickly understood that his case was far from isolated. Little by little, I collected testimonies from other victims who also lost their eyes. I spoke with doctors, relatives of the victims and the victims themselves before publishing all these stories. In late November, medical officials and doctors in Iran released a report documenting the number of patients they were seeing with eye injuries. In November 2022, doctors claimed that according to statistics compiled in just 3 hospitals in Tehran, more than 500 people lost their eyes. In Kurdistan, doctors counted at least 80 people with the same injuries. So from September 2022 to March 2023, the main figure we have is that at least 580 people in Iran lost one or two of their eyes in the protests. Personally, I hold the documents and contact details of more than 100 different victims.
Once this first story was discovered, why did you decide to focus exclusively on this question of blindness of the eyes?
I took a slap in the face when I understood that for more than 40 years, we have constantly counted the number of opponents and demonstrators killed in Iran, but we have very few documents on the living victims, those who must continue to live with their injuries, whether physical or psychological. We often don’t let the injured speak, even though they are the ones who can talk about their daily lives. The international media talk a lot about the demonstrations and violence taking place in the streets of Iran, but the cameras rarely focus on the prisons, the hospitals, the refugee camps. People don’t know how this violent situation affects residents in the long term. This is why I decided to focus on this subject.
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Concretely, what have you discovered about the use of blindness as a weapon of war? How do the police operate?
Together with colleagues from IranWire, we detailed everything in two reports, a very general and complete one published in January 2023 and one focused on the ophthalmological impact of these projectiles. With the documents collected, I was able to identify a repetitive pattern, a systemic and systematic use of this war technique. This is why in our two reports, we speak of a “crime against humanity” to describe this method of blindness. It has been observed that during demonstrations, the police, armed from head to toe, observe the crowd and then fire tear gas at the demonstrators. Then, they use lasers to signal other police officers to prioritize targeting the leaders of the demonstration. That’s when they take out their guns and shoot, with either thin metal balls, or large plastic balls containing metal, which instantly injure on impact. Other demonstrators participate from their cars, honking their horns. We have seen that the police also attack these vehicles with their batons and guns to break the windshield. The pieces of glass then project into the eyes.
Victims are found in all cities, and they are of all types: men, women, young, older… What must be understood is that the police choose these people. It’s all intentional: they target the protesters who are on the front lines, those who can encourage others to join the protest. The precision of the impacts and the medical scans of the skeletons testify to this intention: when there are more than 20 bullet holes around the eyes, it is clear that the person was targeted. As the doctors quickly pointed out, we also know that this information was public, known. The government therefore knew full well what was happening, but did nothing to stop it.
Why do law enforcement primarily target the eyes? What do they represent?
The eyes are not just any part of the body. For me, they are a window with which we immortalize and retain the truth. So when the police target this part of the body, it means that they want at all costs to close this window so that the demonstrators can no longer testify and can no longer see, literally, the crimes around them. them. This is exactly what they want: to keep us in the shadows. They also cripple the people to put pressure on others. The eyes are visible, so an eye injury immediately induces a label, so that everyone in your neighborhood will know that this political regime can attack you in the same way if you go to protest against them. It is a warning, a deterrent. Blindness is also a way of preventing victims from coming back to protest. Because after their injuries, most stay at home for months to treat their eyes and therefore can no longer participate in combat physically. Their loved ones are busy taking care of them and treating them, and therefore will not go to the streets either. When we mutilate and handicap someone, we mutilate the entire community, an entire society.
What are the consequences for blinded victims?
The results ? Their lives, sometimes. Some victims died from these eye injuries. Economically, it is a disaster. Insurance does not cover treatment costs. Physically, according to doctors, the suffering is horrible, unimaginable. You end up wanting your eyes taken out to stop the pain. Psychologically, it is also terrible because the victims can find themselves alone, isolated, destroyed. Sometimes their families cannot support them and provide for their needs, and may even reject the person from the household since this injury is the ultimate sign of participation in protests. Losing your eye or your eyes obviously deteriorate physical appearance and self-image. If they have one eye left, as soon as these people see their reflection, they will have a permanent reminder of the pain they carry within them. There is a saying in Persian that Iranians have the most beautiful eyes in the world. Our eyes are a mark of our identity, of our history. And this diet takes everything we have: beauty, physique, mentality, life, hope.
However, it should also be noted that for some victims, these eye injuries are like a medal of honor. A symbol of resilience and resistance, despite the pain. Some accept their disability as a war trophy and show themselves in public or appear on social networks with googly eyes, without patches and their heads held high, to show that they have not given in to despair. This is also why the government started arresting and imprisoning some of these deluded people: to prevent them from inspiring others.
As an Iranian journalist, how do you work on this subject of blindness? Isn’t that too hard psychologically?
Of course it’s very hard. Every time I receive new testimonies from blinded victims and speak with them for the first time on the phone, as soon as I hang up, I go into the shower and cry. I think I will never get rid of this guilt that I carry for having managed to leave Iran. But doing this work as a journalist is my weapon, my responsibility. This is my way of fighting this criminal political regime, of being the voice of my fellow citizens, and of telling the truth about the situation in Iran. I transfer my anger, the grief I carry and everything I left behind to come here in exile, into my work. It’s what keeps me alive and gives me hope. I need to tell myself that I did everything to act and try to help them.
You are the journalist who revealed that Mahsa Amini was in a coma. How did you obtain this information?
On September 13, 2022, I noticed several tweets on Twitter that indicated that a young Iranian girl had been arrested by the morality police and was now in the hospital. We had neither his name nor precise information on his situation. I called my sources in Iran, and got the name of the hospital, the victim’s name and his brother’s contact. So I called him and he immediately wanted to testify. He told me everything and then insisted that I name him in the article. I was afraid for him, but he said to me: “ I have nothing to lose. They killed my sister. I want to shout Mahsa’s name to the entire country. » He then sent me the photos of Mahsa Amini in a coma in the hospital, and then I published the story on September 14. Two days later, we learned that she had indeed died.
Were you aware that this news would be the spark that would ignite the Iranian people?
No, I haven’t thought about it, at least not to this extent. For me, I was just doing my job as a journalist, as I have done hundreds of times before. The months before that, several other more or less similar stories of young girls arrested for similarly obscure reasons had already taken place, so it was nothing new. But this time, it was too much. The people were ready, and angry.
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