United Nations

The United Nations is evoked through references to humanitarian work and international service rather than presented as an institution with a developed organizational history. Its most substantial appearances connect Sofia Zetterlund’s memories of a UNICEF report on child soldiers in Port Loko with an investigation into Jimmie Furugård, a former UN soldier whose service included Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Humanitarian Work and Sofia’s Report

Seven years after writing a report for UNICEF, Sofia returns to the file and wonders whether she is ready to revisit that period. Her memories include child soldiers in Port Loko and a UNICEF pediatrician who was killed by children he had set out to help. The recollection turns on the reversal of victim and perpetrator: the children’s suffering and the violence they later commit occupy the same frame, making the work of helping them inseparable from the damage surrounding them.

The report gives Sofia’s professional history a specific humanitarian setting, but the novel does not describe the United Nations directing the work or explain UNICEF’s institutional relationship to it. The organization’s presence here is therefore mediated by Sofia’s remembered report and its difficult subject, not by an account of policy, personnel, or operations.

UN Service in the Criminal Investigation

The UN also enters the present-day investigation through Jimmie Furugård. Jeanette Kihlberg tells Jens Hurtig that Furugård served with the UN: his first two years were in Kosovo, followed by one year in Afghanistan. He had last served with the organization three years earlier and left with mixed references.

The details make international service part of the investigators’ picture of Furugård, but do not establish that his military record caused or explains his later conduct. Jeanette’s account places that record alongside separate information about his convictions and charges for rape and violent assault. The novel thus presents UN service as biographical context within an inquiry, not as an institutional explanation for the allegations.

Scope and Narrative Significance

These references give the United Nations two sharply different narrative associations: the humanitarian setting of Sofia’s work with a report for UNICEF, and the professional history of a former UN soldier under investigation. Neither context develops into a portrait of the organization itself. Instead, the institution is encountered at a human scale, through remembered aid work and through the service record attached to one person.