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The recent arrest of war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who stands accused of masterminding the siege of Sarajevo and subsequent massacres, prompts questions about the Bosnian war.
"I knew him for sure," Bregovic says of Karadzic. "In the war you can discover how people can be animals and how people can be angels. Without that war he would just be a psychiatrist and poet."
So how did he feel when Karadzic was arrested? "They are just small politicians in the middle of big historical events. They are not Tito [the communist leader of Yugoslavia, who died in 1980]. Poor guys. They found themselves in the middle of a situation they could not handle."
Poor guys? It's a strange assessment of men with the blood of tens of thousands of people on their hands. Maybe something was lost in translation, but this could also be a peculiarly Balkan way of philosophising horrors past.
Bregovic now divides his time between Paris and Belgrade. With Slovenia already part of the European Union and Serbia, Croatia and other former Yugoslav republics angling for membership, I ask whether he is hopeful about the future of the Balkans.
"If you are born in that place, you have to be ready to have lots of bad news," he says.
In the meantime, there appears to be nothing better than drinking to the fiery sounds of gypsy brass and fiddles and giving the two-finger salute to the absurdity of life.