Mostar // RAMBO

“Rambo died.”

No, not that Rambo. The Rambo in question here wasn’t an angry man with an unintelligible voice doing battle in Vietnam. This Rambo didn’t have a slug on his back. True story, I’ve never seen any of the Rambo films, and the only bit I have seen involved ol’ Sly standing in a pond with a leech or a slug on his back. I thought it was disgusting.

So, no, not that Rambo. This Rambo was a 21-year-old Roma guy known to his parents as Marko but known to everyone else as Rambo. I don’t remember the first time I met Rambo, but I can be confident that I’d guess the location. Caffe Stari Grad, Mostar. We didn’t share a language at all, but he was a funny kid. I was a funny kid. He’d hang around, ask me questions I couldn’t answer, and look at whatever I was typing. I’d buy him ice cream and teach him an English word or two. The English I taught him wasn’t exactly useful (it was John English, for those who know what that means), but the point wasn’t the language. It was encouraging what was clearly a vibrant inquisitive streak. Rambo was quick to learn, eager to do so, respectful, and cheerful. In any other world, he would have been making his way through the education system, looking forward to a career in whatever industry interested him most. Put bluntly, he was a good kid.

But that wasn’t going to happen because Rambo died. Rambo was found dead in the doorway of a building on Fejičeva, the main pedestrian street in Mostar. Heart attack, I think that was the cause. Aldina had told me he was looking bigger, so maybe other things were involved. Of course, cardiac arrhythmia is what gets us all, but death isn’t about that final moment. Life isn’t about that moment.

It didn’t matter how inquisitive or curious Rambo was. He was a Roma. A third-class citizen at best, socially, and legally. Now, don’t make the mistake of thinking this is unique to Bosnia and Herzegovina; far from it. With a handful of exceptions (small municipalities here and there), the Roma are treated terribly and have always been treated terribly. They don’t want to help themselves. They like to live that way. Oh, but he’s a Roma, what do you expect?

Replace ‘Roma’ with any other ethnicity there.

A lot of people have an opinion on the Roma, but they don’t know much. I don’t know anything about zoology, biology, geography, marine biology, cryptozoology, evolutionary theory, evolutionary biology, meteorology, limnology, history, herpetology, palaeontology and archaeology, but I think…

That is a Stewart Lee joke. Most of the jokes here are Stewart Lee jokes.

This isn’t a joke. It is generally assumed that today’s Roma are descendants of folks from the northwestern part of India, but a millennium and a half have passed since then, and nomadic trends have rendered the link frail. They made it to the Balkans in the 11th century, most likely, although my thoughts on such things are always painted with confused smiles. Did a group of Roma wander in, announce themselves, and the local scribe made a note of it? How does it work?

What isn’t up for debate is that they were virtually enslaved from the get-go, and things got worse from there. The Habsburgs forcibly removed Roma children from their parents and put them in special boarding schools. No tradition, no language. Fast forward to the 20th century, and World War II went about as well for the Roma as you’d assume. Anywhere between 220,000 and 1.5 million were murdered by Nazi Germany, a chapter of the Nazi Holocaust that gets forgotten. Many were simply mowed down in the street. At the risk of sounding blase, things couldn’t get any worse, could they?

Oh, John, you beautiful hypocrite. Lament the mistreatment of the Roma all you like, but what have you ever done to improve things? Have a few chats with a kid in Mostar? Buy an ice cream? Mate, if you’re patting yourself on the back for buying ice cream, life is going to get plenty hard, plenty quick. Do better research. Be less dismissive. Be a better person.

Be a better person.

Be a better person, whatever the fuck that means.

Believe it or not, communism was relatively kind to the Roma. It was a low bar, of course, as ‘not being gunned down in the streets’ was a step in the right direction, but Yugoslavia’s treatment of the Roma was progressive. Again, it is depressing that ‘basic respect’ was considered progressive, but here we are. Media and education improved, and Yugoslavia even aired the world’s first Romani-language TV program.

And then, the war.

Where are you going with this? How are things now for the Roma in Bosnia and Herzegovina? Most estimates suggest that only 15% of Roma kids stay in school until age 16, more than 50% of Roma are unemployed, and more than 20% don’t have an indoor toilet. Of course, statistics is statistics, but the fact that these are census questions tells their own story. Another story is told by that of arguably Yugoslavia’s most famous Roma, Arif Heralić. A miner from Zenica, a likeness of Heralić was featured on the 10 dinar note. He died in extreme poverty.

I don’t know if Rambo died in poverty, but he died alone. Comparing death is pointless, it isn’t a subject for pastel colours, and there is no way to soften death. My sister died in her sleep, surrounded by people who loved her, with paramedics doing all they could to keep her alive. There was nothing beautiful about it, and it will haunt me until the day I die.

Rambo died in a doorway, completely alone. His family were nowhere to be seen, no paramedics were struggling to keep his heart beating. He died in the night, and his corpse lay in a doorway for hours before he was found. He might have known he was dying, fighting and struggling before taking his last breath in a piss-stained doorway. Maybe he was murdered. His death was ignored, nobody cared, a footnote in the paper and a comment or two on the street.

I have no idea what the point of this was. I hope Rambo is in a better place because lord knows he was failed by this one. You’ll get that shirt, not that I can remember which one it was.

Be a better person, whatever the fuck that means.

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