When Seppo slept, people died – “Of course I knew” – 2024-02-19 15:55:53

There are dead people lying on the ground, as well as skeletons gnawed bare by dogs and scavengers.

The UN representative describes the scene around the military hospital in Kigali as a macabre spectacle, surreal, shocking and creepy.

According to the UN representative, the floors of the hospital are bathed in blood. In the garden there were piles of corpses and mutilated women and children in their death struggles.

In that very hospital, a military surgeon Seppo Salminen worked with his international team and helped the victims of war.

The UN representative’s description of Salmis was partly a brisk exaggeration. However, the fact was that the reality in Kigali, Rwanda was unspeakably brutal. The hospital’s patients were victims of an ongoing genocide.

The patient numbers were massive, hygiene was non-existent. The situation was worsened by travel sickness and the widespread AIDS epidemic that broke out in Central Africa. Salminen was in charge of that hospital.

Seppo Salminen says that he does not know how many patients he has operated on in his career as a surgeon. – Calculating it is not meaningful. Elle Laitila

Indiscriminate killing

When Russia attacked Ukraine in the spring of 2022, it was time for Salmis to publish his own experiences of the Rwandan genocide.

Civilians were killed in Irpin and Butša as arbitrarily as 28 years ago in Rwanda.

– There was a reason to put my experience in Rwanda in the package.

The skeleton of the book was a diary written by Salminen’s hand in a square notebook from the Rwandan period. The book As a surgeon in Rwanda (WSOY) delivered Leena Hirvonen.

Salminen wrote in his Rwandan diary in his bed every night before crawling into his sleeping bag. The mattress was on the floor. There was a mosquito net around it, which did not keep the fleas away.

The duty assignment at the International Red Cross field hospital lasted one hundred days. A field hospital was quickly established in the classrooms of the Catholic girls’ school in Kigali.

The operating room was also a former classroom. There were no x-rays, no laboratories, and not even running water or regular electricity. Protective gloves used in surgeries were washed and used again and again.

Gotta sleep

Salminen received an invitation from the Red Cross to become the director of the military hospital in Rwanda, because he was known to know how to work in extreme conditions.

Before Rwanda, Salminen had worked, for example, in a military surgical hospital in Pakistan. The family-oriented Salminen thought for fifteen minutes before saying yes to the new assignment.

Salminen flew to Kigali, Rwanda to replace his colleague, as he was no longer able to carry out his duties.

– A colleague tried to do too much work. I found that it doesn’t work. You can’t live without borders.

Salminen forced himself and his team to sleep at night, even though there would have been patients to treat even then. They had to sleep, eat and drink to keep them functional.

– Of course I knew that people were dying all the time. You shouldn’t have thought about it. The feelings then had to be externalized.

With the nerves of a cow

Salminen tells his story in a calm voice and in sentences stripped of useless words.

He thinks that the calmness inherited from his genes has helped him in his work as a military surgeon.

– I have the nerves of a cow. They help me keep calm, even if the house is collapsing around me.

Salminen was born in Savukoski, Eastern Lapland, two years after the end of World War II. Home village burned to the ground at the end of the war. Everything had to be built from scratch.

War was still present in Salminen’s childhood, even though peace had been made.

The children played war, and when the sound of the plane was heard, the children hid behind rocks or under tables. Mines were found in the forests.

As a child, Salminen had to be hospitalized all the way to Helsinki, where he was cared for, among others, by the legendary Uncle Arvo Arvo Ylppö. Salminen decided even then that he, too, wanted to be a doctor who helps other people.

“I learned to leave”

The profession of a doctor was a distant goal for a boy from a small and remote village. The school was a hundred kilometers from home. The seed of a future career was sown in those trips.

– That’s where I learned to leave.

Chance took Salminen to study in Switzerland and from there to an international career.

Salminen, who speaks five languages, has lived in eight countries. Today, he lives with his doctor wife in Lyon, France.

– The medical profession is a vocation for me. It’s part of the identity.

Salminen has hardly been afraid of working in military hospitals. Fear wouldn’t have helped anything or anyone.

– A surgeon must be sure that he knows his job.

– If a seriously injured patient dies, it’s not my fault. I’ve done everything I could.

“You shouldn’t be nervous”

As the most important lesson from his work career, Salminen raises the idea that you don’t need to be startled by every tic-tac-toe.

– You shouldn’t get nervous about everything.

In Salminen’s opinion, the best moments as a military surgeon have been those when he and his team have been able to save both mother and child with the help of emergency surgery.

– The worst moments at work have been those when doing everything has not been enough.

He has thought a lot about war and the psychology of war.

– In war, I’m not interested in how, but why.

According to Salminen, the causes of war can always be found in history. Therefore, the history of warring countries should be studied.

In his opinion, the historical reasons for which delusions of a return to Russian imperialist power are maintained in the Kremlin have still not been considered enough.

Everything is taken care of

The Rwandan field hospital was sometimes clearly hearing Kalashnikov fire and powerful explosions. The rockets whizzed by. The hospital staff could only hope they wouldn’t get hit.

The patients were many wounded, young men recruited as soldiers, but also others. Such a number of dead and wounded could not be prepared in advance.

Everyone who was brought and entered the hospital was treated, whether they were Hutu or Tutsi, victims or murderers.

Salminen took care of births and C-sections at the Kigali field hospital, he amputated limbs and operated on head, limb, eye and internal organ injuries.

The working days were always extremely stressful and long.

The injuries and fates of the patients were so horrible that the experienced war surgeon, who had seen a lot, had no more words to describe the feelings that had awakened in him during the work leave.

A machete in Finland

– War is stupid, senseless and terrible. You shouldn’t do that. You can also die in that, says Salminen.

On the cover of the book “Kirurgina Ruandassa” there are two very different knives crossed.

The top is a graceful and shiny, clean surgeon’s knife. The other is a rudimentary looking machete, a machete. The brown spots on the machete are probably rust, but the color also reminds me of dried blood.

Huge numbers of people were killed with machetes in Rwanda. They have been mutilated and tortured with machetes. They were also worn by children recruited as soldiers.

When Salminen left Rwanda for home, he also had one machete among his luggage. Salminen had received it as a souvenir from one of the hospital’s employees. The employee did not say how it had happened to him.

A machete that traveled from Rwanda passed customs inspection. Now the machete is on the wall of Salminen’s cottage in Kuusamo.

– It still always leads my thoughts to Kigali, Salminen says.

Corrected machete knife spelling at 10:34am.