Opening sentence of our next report, with footnote:

The Sandzak of Novi Pazar is chiefly remembered as one of the smaller pieces in the game played by the Great Powers before World War I, an obscure place which doomed those who got too closely involved with it.*

* See, for instance, “The Lost Sanjak”, a short story by Saki (H.H. Munro) published in 1910, whose protagonist’s failure to remember the location of Novibazar (Novi Pazar) proves fatal; and Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, in which a minor character, Lord Blatherard Osmo, “occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office … for on this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe”, and similarly comes to a very sticky end.

Lord Blatherard Osmo in the Pynchon novel is found drowned in a bath of tapioca, which I think qualifies as suitably sticky.