She also said, in different interviews, that the crash had affected her parents’ lives deeply and negatively. Her parents died within a few years of the crash, and she believed the stress of what had happened to her had contributed to their deaths. Survivor’s guilt in this more specific form — the guilt of the ripple effects, of what the survival cost the people who loved the survivor — was part of the emotional weight she carried.
She said, at various points: “I am like a cat — I have had nine lives.”
## Later Life: Political Work and the Anti-Milošević Opposition
The political dimension of Vesna Vulović’s life after the crash is inseparable from the political history of Yugoslavia and its successor states. She had been, for the first two decades after the crash, a celebrated figure in a Yugoslavia that no longer existed by the early 1990s. What replaced it — in Serbia specifically — was a political environment in which her celebrity would be put to use by power.
Slobodan Milošević consolidated political control in Serbia in the late 1980s and rose to dominance within the disintegrating Yugoslav federation. His political project — Serbian nationalist, authoritarian, and ultimately responsible for a series of wars in the former Yugoslav territory that killed tens of thousands of people and produced the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War — was opposed by a coalition of Serbian civil society figures, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens who put themselves at considerable personal risk.
Vulović was among them. In the early 1990s, she joined the anti-Milošević opposition, attending protests, speaking publicly against the regime, and aligning herself with the Democratic Party — the main liberal opposition party in Serbia. Her participation in anti-government demonstrations placed her in physical danger; she was present at confrontations with riot police that characterized the volatile political atmosphere of Serbia in the 1990s.