Kosovo President, Ambassador, Lobbied Influencers to Back Land Swaps

A French journalist and an American academic have told BIRN that they were lobbied to write positively about "border corrections" and a potential land swap between Kosovo and Serbia.

Jean-Baptiste Chastand, the Central Europe correspondent for Le Monde, said Majorelle PR & Events contacted him to arrange a meeting with Qendrim Gashi, Kosovo's ambassador to France, on September 19, 2018.

As BIRN previously revealed, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci contacted the French PR firm to promote "territorial modification" as part of a solution to the dispute between Serbia and its former province, whose independence in 2008 it does not recognise.

"Gashi came to Le Monde with a woman from Majorelle in order to talk about the territorial exchange," Chastand told BIRN. "He [Gashi] was basically saying that [territorial exchange] is a good idea to bring about peace, but he wasn't very specific as it wasn't clear what territory we were talking about."

Gashi was appointed ambassador to France by the PDK-LDK coalition government in 2016, in which current Kosovo President Thaci served as foreign minister.

Gashi told BIRN on 27 May that he got in touch with Majorelle, to "make contacts with journalists easier" and "categorically" denied that he had ever been involved in lobbying in favour of border changes. "The answer is simple, categorically: no," he stated.

After his meeting with Gashi, Chastand said he wrote an article on the idea of territorial changes, but did not quote the ambassador, as he didn't need to.

Other articles discussing territorial exchange continued to appear in the French media. In September 2018, Le Figaro published an article on the apparent readiness of President Thaci and President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia...

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