By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 27, 1998; Page A30

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, March 26—Serbian forces in the volatile southern province of Kosovo have been beefed up in recent days despite repeated international demands that Belgrade withdraw its paramilitary police and defuse a standoff with secessionist rebels, U.S. officials said today.

A high-ranking U.S. diplomat said several hundred Serbian Interior Ministry police have been added to existing forces in the last few days. The buildup has contributed to tensions in the central Kosovo region of Drenica, west of the provincial capital of Pristina, where more than 80 ethnic Albanians, including women and children, have died in the past month in a crackdown by Serbian forces.

The addition of new Serbian forces into Kosovo nearly three weeks after the United States first demanded they be withdrawn underlines the limits of Washington's influence in what is widely seen as an explosive new conflict in the Balkans.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, under whose thumb the Serbian police serve, refused today to meet with Robert S. Gelbard, President Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans. Gelbard, who was in Belgrade and Pristina today, did meet with other high-ranking Serbian leaders.

Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the largest republic in what remains of Yugoslavia.

The snub by Milosevic came a day after Wednesday's meeting of foreign ministers of the United States, Russia, France, Germany, Italy and Britain in which Washington was unable to convince its allies to go along with tough new sanctions against Belgrade over Kosovo. Instead, the Balkans "contact group" gave Milosevic another month to start a dialogue with ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and pull out his "special police" paramilitary forces from the province.

Speaking to reporters in Pristina, Gelbard denounced the "continued and deepening and apparently permanent presence of the special police," which he said "has created an environment that is not conducive at all to further progress" on Kosovo.

Another diplomatic source said the current Serbian buildup in Kosovo includes the same special forces unit that was used in a major paramilitary police assault on ethnic Albanians in the village of Prekaz on March 6. Dozens of ethnic Albanians died in that incident, triggering international condemnation and the threat of sanctions.

About 90 percent of Kosovo's 2 million people are ethnic Albanians, but they are dominated politically and economically by the Serbs. Although the Serbian portion of Kosovo's population has been declining for decades, Serbs still consider the province to be the cradle of their civilization and insist it must remain part of Serbia.

Gelbard, reaffirming a key demand of the contact group, today urged Albanian and Serbian leaders to move toward negotiations on Kosovo's status. The province enjoyed substantial autonomy until 1989, when Milosevic revoked it unilaterally.

Gelbard met with ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova and his new 15-member advisory council to press them on moving toward talks with Belgrade. So far, though, the politically fractious Albanians seem prepared only for talks among themselves about talks.

There has been sporadic fighting and police activity in recent days in Drenica. Journalists who traveled today near the village of Acherevo, believed to be a stronghold for guerrillas of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, said they could hear explosions coming from the area.

Special correspondent Colin Soloway in Pristina contributed to this report.