Nebojsa Malic doesn’t speak Serbo-Croat very well

Nebojsa Malic, the Srebrenica genocide denier and clown who comments on former-Yugoslav affairs for the website Antiwar.com, earlier this summer wrote the following:

‘Right after the pontiff’s visit, Zagreb announced that it will hold a Gay Pride Parade on June 18. The motto of the event is “Tomorrow belongs to us.” If that sounds familiar, here’s why.’

The link, which Malic provides, is to the famous scene in the 1972 film ‘Cabaret’, set in Germany in the early 1930s, in which a young Nazi stirs a crowd by singing the song ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’. Malic thereby links the organisers of the Croatian gay pride march to the Nazis.

However, as Malic later admitted in the comments below his post, the motto of the Croatian gay pride event was actually ‘I buducnost je nasa’. This translates as ‘And the future is ours’. By no stretch of the imagination does it translate as ‘Tomorrow belongs to us’. The word ‘buducnost’ means ‘future’. The Croatian (or Serbian) word for ‘tomorrow’ is ‘sutra’. The Serbo-Croat for ‘Tomorrow belongs to us’ would be ‘Sutra pripada nama’. In fact, real members of the Croatian far-right who have wanted to use the slogan from Cabaret have had no trouble translating it correctly.

The only possible reason I can think of, to explain how Malic could have made such a mistake, is that even though he is a native speaker of Serbo-Croat, a Bosnian born and bred, he doesn’t actually speak his own language very well.

What other explanation could there possibly be ? It’s an absolute mystery.

Bosnian humour

2011 has been an extremely uneventful year for news, both in the UK and globally. So little has happened this year in Britain and the world; so empty have the newspapers been of interesting events or stories, that one is at a loss for what to blog about. I have just returned from a two-week holiday in Dalmatia to find that London already seems a bit cold and grey, and it even rained last night. So, to perk things up over here at Greater Surbiton, and to try to convince readers that I’m not a complete politically correct prude and killjoy, here’s a little Bosnian joke (from Boris Dezulovic in Oslobodjenje - hat tip to Sarah C.)…

Mujo joins the Bosniak Academy of Sciences and Arts, which immediately sends him as a delegate to a UN conference on ethnic stereotypes. Upon arrival at the conference venue, he spies an attractive woman – tall, long blonde hair, large breasts, curvaceous figure, etc. – whom he takes to be a receptionist, so he approaches her to ask where the cafeteria is.

‘I’m not a receptionist’, said the woman, ‘I’m a professor of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and I’m giving a presentation to this conference.’

‘No way ?!’, said Mujo, surprised.

‘Indeed’, said the woman, ‘My presentation is on sexual stereotypes of ethnic groups.’

‘Interesting’, said Mujo, stroking his chin.

‘It certainly is’, said the woman, ‘For example, it is widely believed that the French are the best lovers, whereas in reality, it isn’t the French, but the Greeks. And many people think that black men are the most handsomely endowed, but in fact, it is the Native Americans who are the largest in that department.’

‘But I’m being very impolite,’ said the woman, ‘talking on like this about myself and my work. And you are…?’

‘Geronimo’, said Mujo, prepared; ‘Geronimo Papadopoulos. Pleased to meet you.’