A recent X post by @OlgicaRajkovic on X presents a dramatic photomontage under the slogan “Za svaku suzu našeg naroda platićete! Bog je na strani Srba!” (“For every tear of our people you will pay! God is on the side of the Serbs!”). The image is a classic piece of low-quality emotional propaganda: a hospitalised older man, a screaming little girl being hugged, a large teary eye framed by the outline of Kosovo, two men in an embrace, and an Orthodox church at night with a red flag. It is designed to evoke pure tribal pathos rather than invite scrutiny.
The core deception: Nenad as unambiguous martyr
The hospital patient is clearly meant to represent Nenad Rašković from the village of Dren near Zubin Potok. Serbian media and political actors have promoted his claim that Kosovo Police officers searched his home, beat him, took him into a forest, tied him to a beech tree, and assaulted him while demanding a confession to wartime crimes. Photographs of bruises circulated, and he gave interviews from a hospital bed.
What the collage carefully omits is everything that undercuts the pure-victim narrative. There is no independent corroboration of the assault claim beyond Rašković’s own statements. Kosovo’s Police Inspectorate opened a preliminary investigation; that process remains open. Meanwhile, authorities reported finding multiple weapons, including additional AK-47 assault rifles, on his property.
Forensic work is examining possible links to killings of Albanian civilians connected to a mass-grave site in the Kalludra area of Zubin Potok. Sources indicate Rašković fled to Serbia, where he has remained unavailable for interviews under Kosovo jurisdiction. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić later visited him in Belgrade and framed the injuries as the face of “Kurti’s police.”
An image that presents an unproven personal claim as collective national martyrdom, while erasing the weapons discoveries, the mass-grave context, the man’s departure from Kosovo, and the ongoing investigation, is not documentation. It is selective storytelling.
Ultra-nationalist irredentism in visual form
The most revealing element is the large eye framed by the map of Kosovo, complete with a single tear. This is textbook irredentist symbolism. Kosovo is depicted not as a contested territory with its own institutions and unresolved wartime issues, but as an organic, wounded part of the Serbian national body. The land itself weeps. Combined with the church-and-flag imagery and the explicit claim that “God is on the side of the Serbs,” the collage converts a local police-raid dispute into sacred national drama.
This is not analysis of police conduct or minority rights. It is a demand that the viewer accept Kosovo as inseparable Serbian soil and interpret any friction as existential aggression against the nation.
The crying girl as emotional accelerant
The screaming little girl being hugged serves the oldest propaganda trick in the book: insert an innocent child to short-circuit critical thought. Her distress is presented as the natural consequence of the alleged assault on Nenad and, by extension, of the “occupation” of Kosovo. No evidence is offered that the child is connected to the specific incident. Her presence simply maximises pathos so that questioning the central claim feels like cruelty toward children and the nation.
Why this is cheap propaganda
The montage stacks hospital injury + crying child + weeping national map + religious symbolism + communal embrace into a single frame of pure grievance. It collapses complexity—conflicting accounts, weapons finds, flight to Serbia, an open investigation—into a binary of Serbian tears versus Albanian/Kosovo-state aggression. The vengeful slogan (“you will pay”) shifts the register from documentation to mobilisation.
Genuine questions about police accountability, the treatment of Kosovo Serbs, and unresolved wartime missing persons deserve rigorous investigation based on evidence. This image does the opposite. It replaces evidence with emotional saturation and irredentist shorthand. It asks the audience to feel rather than to examine, to accept rather than to verify.
The collage is effective only within an audience already primed to see every incident through the lens of national victimhood. Outside that frame, it is transparent: a low-production visual claim that Nenad’s contested story is the story of an entire people, that Kosovo’s outline belongs on a weeping eye, and that God has chosen a side. That is not journalism or advocacy. It is propaganda of the cheapest kind.
