For someone who had joined the Democratic Party and was publicly visible at opposition demonstrations, working at a state airline was not a comfortable position. The demotion and salary reduction that preceded her eventual separation from JAT were the methods the Milošević system used to manage people it could not simply arrest without consequences.
The consequence calculation was real. Arresting Vesna Vulović — a woman who had been decorated by Tito, who held a Guinness World Record, who had been publicly recognized at the highest levels of Yugoslav society — would have generated exactly the kind of international attention that the Milošević government did not need. Foreign journalists who were already critical of the Serbian government would have had another story to write. The optics of arresting a Guinness World Record holder for political activism would have been poor.
So the government managed her economically instead. The demotion reduced her salary. The salary reduction was followed by the termination of her employment, or by a retirement that amounted to the same thing. She was left with a state pension that she described, in her final years, as approximately 300 euros per month — an amount that was barely adequate for living in Belgrade and that reflected none of the decades of work she had given to JAT.
She never sought redress for the employment termination, at least not in any way that entered the public record. After the fall of Milošević in 2000, the political landscape in Serbia changed in ways that could have created opportunities for some form of reconsideration, but the economic damage done to her pension was not reversed. She lived her last years on what the punitive early retirement had left her.