Slavoj Žižek

The prize-winner in the contest for the greatest blunder of 1998 was a
Latin American patriotic terrorist who sent a letter-bomb to a us
consulate in order to protest against the Americans interfering in
local politics. As a conscientious citizen, he wrote on the envelope his
return address; however, he did not put enough stamps on it, so that
the post office returned the letter to him. Forgetting what he put in
it, he opened it and blew himself up—a perfect example of how,
ultimately, a letter always arrives at its destination. And is something
quite similar not happening to the Slobodan Milosevic régime with
the recent nato bombing? For years, Milosevic was sending letter-
bombs to his neighbours, from the Albanians to Croatia and Bosnia,
keeping himself out of the conflict while igniting fire all around
Serbia—finally, his last letter returned to him. Let us hope that the
result of the nato intervention will be that Milosevic will be
proclaimed the political blunderer of the year.

And there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the West finally
intervened apropos of Kosovo—let us not forget that it was there
that it all began with the ascension to power of Milosevic: this
ascension was legitimized by the promise to amend the
underprivileged situation of Serbia within the Yugoslav federation,
especially with regard to the Albanian 'separatism'. Albanians were
Milosevic's first target; afterwards, he shifted his wrath to other
Yugoslav republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia) until, finally, the
focus of the conflict returned to Kosovo—as in a closed loop of
Destiny, the arrow returned to the one who fired it, by way of setting
free the spectre of ethnic passions. This is the key point worth re-
membering: Yugoslavia did not start to disintegrate when the
Slovene 'secession' triggered the domino effect—first Croatia, then
Bosnia, Macedonia . . .—for it was already at the moment of
Milosevic's constitutional reforms in 1987, depriving Kosovo and
Vojvodina of their limited autonomy, that the fragile balance on
which Yugoslavia rested was irretrievably disturbed. From that
moment onwards, Yugoslavia continued to live only because it did
not yet notice it was already dead—it was like the proverbial cat in

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