Journalist, SVT reporter and author Diamant Salihu is awarded the Raoul Wallenberg prize, for “through his work in capturing and raising voices affected by gang violence and its consequences” contributing to “increased knowledge and understanding and motivating action”.
– I want to understand what is happening. The drive I have is that I want to tell everyone, and do it in the correct way. You have to be where it hurts, because otherwise you won’t make a difference, he says.
Consistently and for a long time, he has reported in features, documentaries and books about Shottaz, the Death Squad, the Kurdish fox and young people who are killed and kill each other. He lives today at a secret address, but is not afraid for his own safety.
– I can’t walk around being afraid, because then I would never be able to monitor these issues.
“We can’t watch”
After several intense years, he has recently been on parental leave. Now it is the slightly one-year-old daughter Agnes, who, like the job, keeps him awake at night. But the criminal world does not sleep – the job is constantly reminded.
– It has been difficult, because everything from parents to informants contact me around the clock.
– There is, I feel, a great deal of desperation and frustration, from people in the criminal environment to government officials, he continues.
Salihu claims to see a radicalization within the gang environment, where children are exploited in an increasingly systematic way by older criminals.
– The development makes me all the more motivated to keep monitoring this, to keep explaining what’s happening so that more people get involved and do something. We cannot watch when other people’s children and our own actively seek this environment, or are recruited into it.