Nuri Kino, (born February 25, 1965, in Tur Abdin), is a Swedish-Assyrian award-winning investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, author and human rights expert. He is the author of several nonfiction books, and hundreds of stories and reports from the Middle East, western and eastern Europe as well as Africa over the past two decades. He has won awards for his reporting on human-rights issues, and is the founder of human rights organization A Demand For Action (ADFA) which advocates for persecuted minorities in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Life and career
Nuri Kino is the eldest of four children of an Assyrian family that originates from the village of Kfar-Shomac, south of the City of Midyat, in a region known as Tur Abdin. His parents moved to Germany as guest workers when he was four; in 1974, when he was eight, they visited his grandparents in Sweden and decided to stay because there were more jobs. He was kidnapped twice as a child. In 1985 he became one of Sweden's first male medical recorders. He has also run a restaurant; in 1994 he was chosen as Stockholm's most popular restaurant owner.
In 1998, he graduated from the Poppius School of Journalism in Stockholm. The following year he was in Istanbul when the Marmara earthquake occurred. He was interviewed by international news agencies and wrote a widely cited report on the collapse of buildings that had been known to be weak; this was the real start of his career as a journalist. He has since worked as a freelance investigative journalist for Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Aftonbladet and Metro. In 2002 he started freelancing for the Swedish radio station Sveriges Radio. His reporting has been focused on human rights, immigration and refugee issues, and he has worked for the media abroad in countries such as Turkey, Denmark, Norway, Finland, the U.S., and the Netherlands (reporting for the BBC and on the Dutch program Dit is de Dag).
Nuri Kino was the first journalist to interview Irena Sendler, a Polish nurse who risked her life to smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghettos of Warsaw during World War II. The article was published in the Swedish daily newspaper 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. However, she received several national and international distinctions for her heroic deeds during the Second World War.
After a two-year hiatus from journalism, Kino went to Lebanon to write a report on the Christian minority in Syria, Mellan taggtråden (Between the Barbed Wire), published in 2013; it was widely cited in the media internationally and gave rise to many debates, among them the U.S. Congress Joint Subcommittee Hearing on Religious Minorities in Syria: Caught in the Middle.
He was selected to host the Sommar radio program on P1 on June 18, 2004.
Nuri Kino also does aid work, sometimes with the Youth Initiative of the Syriac Orthodox Church. In 2014 he founded A Demand For Action, an organization that provides relief and advocates for minorities in the Middle East, particularly Christians in Iraq and Syria. From this position, in his home town of Södertälje, Sweden, he has developed a global network of human rights experts and activists who serve as a deep resource on persecuted minorities in the Middle East, frequently sought out by national politicians, multinational organizations, the European Parliament and the United States Congress. In an interview, European Parliamentarian Lars Adaktusson said of Kino, "If Nuri would not have started ADFA we would not be able to have the ongoing genocide of Christians in Iraq and Syria recognized as a Genocide in the European Parliament. We would probably not even be aware of it. Thanks to ADFA's tireless work we have been able to even have the U.S. congress to recognize the atrocities as genocide."
Along with Swedish entrepreneur Gunilla Von Platen, Kino is leading the Swedish part of the Little Angel project; an orphanage that is being built outside Damascus in Syria where children from Iraq and Syria who have lost their families will be able to live, eat, and go to school.
Television and film
With Yawsef Beth Turo, Kino made Det ohörda ropet ("The Cry Unheard," 2001), about the killing of Assyrians in Turkey during World War I.