Nuri Kino

Nuri Kino, born on February 25, 1965, in Tur Abdin in south-east Turkey, is a Swedish Assyrian freelance journalist, documentary filmmaker and ex restaurateur. Nuri Kino came to Sweden when he was eight years old. Kino’s Assyrian family originates from the village Kfar-Shomac, situated to the south of the town of Midyat. His parents were guest workers in Germany at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. The family moved to Sweden in 1974. Nuri is the oldest of four siblings. Nuri Kino was one of Sweden’s first male medical recorders in 1985. He has run his own restaurant and represented asylum seekers. He became a journalist in earnest by accident in 1999 when he was in Istanbul at the time of the great earthquake there. Jolin Boldt, the then editor-in-chief of the magazine Sesam, knew that he was in Turkey, called him up and asked him to report. The previous year he had graduated from the Poppius School of Journalism in Stockholm. Since the Turkish earthquake he has worked for newspapers and magazines, as well as for radio and TV. Nuri Kino has also been seen as an expert on minorities in the Middle East, last in connection with a hearing in the U.S. Congress on June 25, 2013. Curious fact: Nuri Kino was one of 14 Swedish men selected for their excellent style by Swedish designer Camilla Thulin in her book Karlar med stil (Men with Style).

Awards and nominations

2010

• Winner of the prestigious European Parliament's Journalist Prize 2010. Kinos sixth nomination for Guldspaden.^[1]

2009

• One of hundred Swedish inspirators, awarded by Leva Magazine^{[citation needed]}

2008

• Ikaros Prize for Best Public Service Radio program by Swedish Radio

2007

• Blatte de Luxe Award for Journalism ^[2]
• Men with Style^{[citation needed]}

2006

• Suryoyo of the Year by Huyodo Magazine^{[citation needed]}
• Journalist of the Year by Qenneshrin and Suroyo TV a Syriac newspaper and satellite television
• Blatte de Luxe Award for Journalism ^[3]
• Assyrian of the Year by Zinda Magazine
• Assyrian of the Year by the Assyrian Youth Federation of Sweden
• The Golden Palm Award at Beverly Hills Film Festival

2004

• Nominated for Guldspaden for a joint effort with Bo-Göran Bodin and Margita Boström for a Swedish radio report
• Ikaros Prize for Best Public Service Radio program by Swedish Radio
• Nominated for Best Radio News Piece of the Year by the Swedish National Radio Academy
• Awarded Det lite storre Journalistpriest for journalist students at Mitt University in Sundsvall, Sweden^{[citation needed]}

2003

• Awarded Guldspaden for a joint effort with Jenny Nordberg and Margita Boström for a Swedish Radio Report

2002

• Awarded Guldspaden for journalism
• Nominated for Save the Children Prize for journalists

2000

• Awarded Guldspaden for a joint effort with Wolfgang Hansson

Journalism

Nuri Kino has worked as an investigative journalist for the Swedish dailies Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Aftonbladet and Metro. For the Swedish television channel SVT he has produced, together with Erik Sandberg, a TV series, Assyriska - landslag utan land (“Assyriska- national football team without a nation”). In 2002 he started freelancing for the Swedish radio station, Sveriges Radio. He has run commentaries and reports in Swedish radio programs such as Ekot, Kaliber, Studio Ett, P1-morgon, Brytpunkten and Qolo, among others.

In Swedish radio news program Ekot, he has alone or with colleagues like Jenny Nordberg, Susan Ritzén, Kajsa Norell, Bo-Göran Bodin, Kristina Hedberg, Marie-Jeanette Löfgren, Magnus Thorén and Urban Hamid investigated and exposed many controversial issues. Examples: War criminals being given residence permits in Sweden. Corrupt honorary consuls. Immigrant informants for the Swedish Security Police. Saddam Hussein’s spies. The interpretation industry. Alleged terrorists abusing the Swedish asylum system. The scandalous expulsion of Christian Iraqis from Sweden. The corruption around EU subsidies to Turkey. Ericsson’s alleged bribery in Ethiopia. The situation of vulnerable children in Sweden. Forgeries of identification papers in Syria. Cynical human smugglers from the Middle East.

Together with Pulitzer Prize winner Jenny Nordberg he made the documentary The High Price of Ransom for the Dan Rather Report.

Between his journalistic exposures, Nuri Kino also does aid work, among others together with the Youth Initiative within the Syriac Orthodox Church.

After a two-year hiatus from journalism, when he was working in home help services, Nuri Kino left for Lebanon to write the personal report Between the Barbed Wire, giving a voice to the Christian minority in Syria. Before the report was published they felt that they had not been heard in the Syrian war. The report was well received and was cited in the media in over twenty countries. The report was effective and gave rise to many debates, among them in the U.S. Congress: "Joint Subcommittee Hearing: Religious Minorities in Syria: Caught in the Middle.” . http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/hearing/joint-subcommittee-hearing-religious-minorities-syria-caught-middle

He has worked for the media in countries like Turkey, Denmark, Norway, Finland, the U.S. and Holland. His reporting has made an echo all over the world; among other things it led to that the local government commissioner of his home town Södertälje, Anders Lago, was invited to discuss the situation of refugees in the United States Congress.

As first non Polish journalist Nuri Kino met and interviewed the human rights activist Irena Sendler. The article was published in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter on February 8, 2003. Shortly after that it was translated into several other languages and among others published in Wprost, the largest weekly magazine in Poland. The following year, two Nobel Prize laureates, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, nominated Sendler for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was nominated a number of times until her death in May 2008 but never received the prize. After Nuri Kino’s story about Sendler, the heroine received several national and international distinctions for her heroic deeds during the Second World War, when, with her life at stake, she saved more than 2,000 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto.

Books

Nuri Kino is the author of the reportage book By God - Sex dagar i Amman (By God – Six Days in Amman) about the consequences of the Iraqi war.

Together with Jenny Nordberg he wrote the suspense novel Välgörarna - Den motvillige journalisten, translated into Finnish, German and Norwegian. The book Gränsen är dragen (Bladh by Bladh) about a present-day “forgotten” genocide, authored with David Kushner, was published in 2010. In 2013 it was published in the U.S. with the title The Line in the Sand. Still Targeted: Continued Persecution of Iraq’s Minorities, report in 2010 for Minority Rights Group.

In 2011, Nuri Kino published the book Den svenske Gudfadern (The Swedish Godfather), about Milan Sevo, born in Serbia but brought up in Sweden and a convicted felon, who claimed that he had been given the task, by close friends of the Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf, to destroy evidence that connected the King and his friends to porn clubs. The affair was widely publicized in the media. The book was launched as a piece of journalism; the author would, according to the publishers, explain why young people are attracted to crime in a way no one had done before in Sweden. Journalist Hanne Kjöller of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter considered the book lacking in both objectivity and criticism of the sources. She called it a “portrait of an idol”. However, six months later, the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet confirms that the information in Nuri Kino’s book is correct. The book became a best-seller and is referred to by Swedish criminologists in reports of criminality among young males in socially exposed neighborhoods.

Radio

On June 18, 2004, Nuri Kino was summer radio host at Swedish radio series ‘Summer in P1’; every year summer hosts are elected among outstanding people in Sweden and it is a great honor to host one’s own show. Winter radio host for the Timbro pod cast in 2009. Another radio show he has appeared in is the Swedish Radio Människor och Tro (People and Faith) and he can be heard discussing politics in the Middle East in BBC World or reporting on human trafficking in the Dutch Radio channel Dit is de Dag.

Book review

Nuri Kino's review of Rosie Malek-Yonan's The Crimson Field, published September 2005.

Excerpt: To read The Crimson Field is to understand that the Assyrians were not merely guests in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. The country of Bet-Nahrin in Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization and the homeland of Assyrians. Through her characters Malek-Yonan gives us an open window into a past history most would prefer to remain unstirred. She allows the reader to see the scars of her nation that have yet to heal. The only way to understand Assyrians of today is to understand their past.

External links

• Nuri Kino official website and blog

References