This is why we should leave the UN. It is a corrupt, useless organization.
In 1993, the UN sent a small force into the most dangerous place on earth.
Bosnia was burning. Villages were being ethnically cleansed. Women were being taken. Families were being executed in their homes. And the world's response was to send peacekeepers with strict orders to watch — but not intervene.
The UN's Nordic Battalion — NORDBAT 2 — arrived late in 1993. 840 soldiers, primarily Swedish, with a Danish tank company and a Norwegian helicopter unit. Young men from peaceful countries that hadn't seen war in decades. Countries where children grew up reading about conflict in history books, not living it outside their windows.
They thought they were going to keep peace.
There was no peace to keep.
What they found instead were militias executing unarmed civilians while UN observers filed reports. Humanitarian convoys being hijacked at gunpoint. Safe zones that were anything but safe. And headquarters thousands of miles away sending orders that had nothing to do with the reality on the ground.
The rules were clear: remain neutral. Do not engage. Stand down.
The Nordic soldiers started ignoring them.
When armed groups set up roadblocks and threatened civilians, the Nordics didn't radio for permission. They pushed through. When militia fighters opened fire on humanitarian convoys, the Nordics fired back — harder. When UN command ordered them to stand down from a confrontation, soldiers sometimes reported losing radio contact. Deliberately. Strategically. Because the alternative was watching innocent people die while holding a working radio in their hands.
Then came the incident that shocked the entire mission.
Shortly after deployment, a Swedish platoon was completely surrounded by a Croatian battalion. The Croats made a demand: hand over three Muslim nurses sheltering with the Swedes, and everyone walks away safely.
Captain Stewe Simson looked at the nurses. Looked at his men. Looked at the Croatian force surrounding them.
He prepared his platoon for combat instead. Outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded — he chose to fight rather than surrender innocent women to certain death. The standoff held. The Croats eventually backed down. The nurses survived.
On April 29, 1994, the Danish tank company was ambushed by Bosnian Serb forces near the village of Kalesija — an engagement that became known as Operation Bøllebank. The Danes responded with devastating firepower. Danish Leopard tanks fired 72 main gun rounds. When it was over, estimates suggested up to 150 enemy soldiers had been killed or wounded. It was Denmark's first combat engagement since World War II.
UN leadership was furious. Words like "trigger-happy" and "reckless" circulated in official cables. The battalion commanders became deeply unpopular with their own governments back home. Reports were filed. Investigations were launched.
Meanwhile, in the villages the Nordic Battalion patrolled, something extraordinary was happening.
People were alive who otherwise wouldn't be.
Bosnian civilians began specifically requesting Nordic patrols. They trusted these soldiers in a way they trusted almost no one else wearing a UN badge — because these soldiers had proved, repeatedly, that they would not stand and watch while something terrible happened. They had shown, with their actions rather than their paperwork, that the lives in those villages mattered more than the rules in a binder.
Other UN units — bound tighter by their own governments' rules of engagement — watched in frustration, many of them privately in agreement with everything the Nordics were doing.
The contrast became impossible to ignore after July 1995.
Srebrenica. A UN-designated safe zone under Dutch protection. Over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically executed while Dutch peacekeepers stood aside under orders. It became one of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II. The Dutch government eventually resigned in 2002 over the failure.
The Nordic Battalion's record stood in direct contrast — proof that different choices, made by commanders willing to face consequences, produced different outcomes.
When NORDBAT 2 soldiers returned home, they were greeted as heroes by the public even as some officials remained uneasy about their methods. Veterans gave interviews decades later still haunted by what they witnessed, still carrying the weight of every moment they felt they hadn't done enough — even as survivors credited them with saving countless lives.
They were peacekeepers who found no peace to keep.
So they chose something harder. They chose to act like what they actually were: soldiers with weapons, training, and a conscience — standing between the defenseless and the people trying to destroy them.
And because of that, some people are alive today who would not otherwise be.
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