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.

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Monday, 29 August 2011 - Posted by Marko Attila Hoare | Balkans, Bosnia, Croatia, Former Yugoslavia, Marko Attila Hoare | Marko Attila Hoare, Nebojsa Malic

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About

A blog devoted to political commentary and analysis with a particular – but far from exclusive – focus on South East Europe. I come from a traditional left-wing background, but believe that the recent failure of most of the left to oppose fascism, genocide and tyranny in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in the Middle East and elsewhere, has definitely discredited left-wing politics in its traditional form. This blog will therefore, among other things, be discussing what a new progressive politics might mean in the twenty-first century.

Born in 1972, I have been studying the history of the former Yugoslavia since 1993, and am intimately acquainted with, and emotionally attached to, the lands and peoples of Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia. In the summer of 1995, I acted as translator for the aid convoy to the Bosnian town of Tuzla, organised by Workers Aid, a movement of solidarity in support of the Bosnian people. In 1998-2001 I lived and worked in Belgrade, Serbia, and was resident there during the Kosovo War of 1999. As a journalist, I covered the fall of Milosevic in 2000. I worked as a Research Officer for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, and participated in the drafting of the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic. I was a member of the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge from 2001-2006, and am currently a Reader at Kingston University, London. I am Section Director for the European Neighbourhood of the Henry Jackson Society, a Cambridge-based think-tank that promotes democratic geopolitics. I live in Surbiton in the UK.

I am the author of three books, The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London, Saqi, 2007), Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943 (London, Oxford University Press, 2006) and How Bosnia Armed (London, Saqi, 2004). I am currently working on a history of modern Serbia.

I have been variously accused of being a neoconservative, Trotskyite and Croat nationalist and a supporter of Islamism and Western imperialism. Depending on how you define these terms, some or all of this may be accurate.

Marko Attila Hoare

markohoare AT hotmail DOT com