Blinding As A Weapon (8): You Can Blind Me, But I Can Still See You

As IranWire has reported, hundreds of Iranians have sustained severe eye injuries after being hit by pellets, tear gas cannisters, paintball bullets or other projectiles used by security forces amid a bloody crackdown on mainly peaceful demonstrations. Doctors say that, as of now, at least 580 protesters have lost one or both eyes in Tehran and in Kurdistan alone.

The report concluded that such actions by the security forces could constitute a “crime against humanity,” as defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statute.

In this series of reports, IranWire presents the victims’ stories as told by themselves. Some have posted their stories, along with their names and pictures, on social media. Others, whose real names shall not be disclosed to protect their safety, have told their stories to IranWire. IranWire could make their identities and medical available to international legal authorities.

This is the story of 31-year-old civil rights and children’s rights activist Mohsen Kafshgar. He was shot in the head with a pellet shotgun and his left eye lost its sight forever.

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“Pull my eyes out/ but I still see you/ Remove my ears/ but I still hear you/ I have no feet but I run toward you/ I have no tongue but I still talk about you/ Remove my hands/ but I shall embrace you/ My heart embraces you just like my hands/ Take away my heart and my brain shall beat for you/ Immolate my brain/ and I shall have you flow in my veins/ My country!”

 

This was the first thing Mohsen Kafshgar posted on Instagram after he lost his left eye. Then he described the night of protests in 2022 when a pellet shot by a member of the security forces hit his left eye.

More than 50 days have passed and Kafshgar writes that his retina was destroyed, and there is no chance he will get his eyesight back. He visited doctors many times and his eye got infected. They wanted to hospitalize him, but he refused.

“Yes, habit is a strange thing and I don’t remember how I could see with both eyes, but I refuse to get accustomed to darkness on one side of my face because getting accustomed to it would mean that I am finished,” he wrote.

Kafshgar was shot in the city of Amol, in the northern province of Mazandaran, on the same night when young men and women kneeled in the street and opened their arms in front of security forces, the same night when many protesters were mowed down.

 Who is Mohsen Kafshgar?

By browsing through Kafshgar’s Instagram posts we can get an idea of his social activities, interests and preoccupations. He was a member of the Imam Ali Popular Students Relief Society, an Iranian NGO that was founded in 1999 to fight poverty and help children. In March 2021, the judiciary ordered the dissolution of the organization following a complaint lodged by the Ministry of Interior.

“For decades now, the most critical activity of the Imam Ali Society has been to support poor and working-class children in the most deprived areas of Iran. At the time of its dissolution, the NGO had served more than 6,000 working and abused children, along with 700 households headed by single mothers. With its 10,000 volunteers, mostly students and young people, the Imam Ali Society was one of the largest and most important NGOs in Iran that was propping up the government’s haphazard efforts to fight poverty in the country,” IranWire wrote at the time.

Pictures of Kafshgar among the victims of devastating floods attest to his activities as a volunteer throughout the years. So does a video showing him and children participating in Persian League football competitions in Amol.

 

Persian League was a series of football competitions that Imam Ali Society organized every year from 2015 until its dissolution. The competitions were the biggest sports events in marginalized areas of Iran.

Mohsen was always looking for hope among the ruins of society. In an album of pictures and videos titled "Hope,” he recorded and shared how the children were prepared to participate in the football competitions.

 

But where there is hope there is also pain. In one of his posts, he names children who have experienced nothing but pain, like Nadia. “I’m a father who stood far away and waited for his children to die,” he wrote about Nadia. Or Like Dariush who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for robbery.

“Wandering Lovers” in Baluchistan

On his Instagram page, Kafshgar has posted several stories and pictures related to his participation in Imam Ali Society’s relief work. “Wandering Lovers” was the society’s first relief project. It was carried out without interruption until the group was dissolved. As part of this project, volunteers left bags of foodstuff and other necessities at the doors of thousands of needy families during Ramadan.

Kafshgar writes that after distributing a thousand bags of foodstuff in Sistan and Baluchistan, one of Iran’s poorest provinces that is home to a Sunni Baluch minority, he had to carry on his shoulders the load of the Baluchi people’s pain, poverty, drug addictions and unemployment.

 

In 2019, when Golestan was hit with floods, Kafshgar set out for the northern province to help. He posted pictures and videos of that journey under the title “A Trip to Aqqala.”

 

Hope is so powerful in Kafshgar that when he writes about his flowers, he says, “The flowers have withered but the leaves are growing.”

Preserving Memories on Gravestones

Mohsen Kafshgar’s job is to record the memory of those departed on gravestones — white stones, black stones, gray stones or marble. Homa Stone is his professional page on Instagram.

Mohsen lost his father in 2009 when he was only 18. His Instagram posts describes the bereavement he has suffered for many years after losing his father. The first picture he posted shows his father as a young man.

 

Now Kafshgar cannot see with both eyes, but his posts are mostly about other people’s pain and sufferings. His latest post shows Nika Shakarami, a 16-year-old girl who was killed by government forces during protests in September 2022, telling Mahsa Amini, whose death in the custody of morality police triggered the ongoing wave of protests: “Mahsa, dear: I think they have forgotten us.”