By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 12, 1998; Page A19

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, March 11—The relatives and friends of more than 50 ethnic Albanians who died in attacks by Serbian police last week used pick-axes, shovels and their own hands today to dig up the victims' bodies from a hilltop west of here and rebury them according to Muslim custom.

With dozens of heavily armed Serbian police standing nearby, the villagers pulled casket after casket from holes where Serbian police and firefighters had buried them late Tuesday in defiance of a demand by Western governments that the bodies first be examined by forensic specialists.

Some of those at the scene in the village of Donji Prekaz, overlooking the blackened shells of homes where many of the victims had lived, became nauseated. Roughly a third of the bodies were not identified when the Serbs hurriedly buried them, and the authorities had made no effort to mark the graves.

The villagers walked stony-eyed past a line of police to reach the grave site so they could position the bodies to point toward Mecca, according to witnesses. But no one was allowed to stage a traditional funeral, evidently because Serbian authorities feared a huge turnout.

Tight security in the area has eased slightly, and some reporters were allowed through checkpoints where they had been turned away for much of the past week. But scores of Serbian police are still patrolling the area in armored personnel carriers and conducting searches of vehicles and passersby.

Serbian forces in the past two weeks have stormed villages in the region in what they said was a crackdown against ethnic Albanian guerrillas advocating independence for the Serbian province, most of whose residents are Albanian. Serbia is the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.

Some villages remain off-limits, and residents of the nearby town of Llausha, which lost a half-dozen ethnic Albanian residents in the fighting, reported that their water and electricity has been cut for the past week. They said the atmosphere remains tense and they fear a further crackdown.

On Tuesday, Robert S. Gelbard, President Clinton's special representative for the Balkans, had called on Yugoslav authorities to open the area to humanitarian workers, diplomats and journalists. He also asked them to begin an unconditional dialogue with ethnic Albanians, who comprise 90 percent of the estimated 2.2 million people in Kosovo.

Serbian officials in Belgrade late Tuesday proposed beginning such a dialogue on the condition that Kosovo's Albanian leaders publicly repudiate any terrorism. They announced further today that they will send four officials to Pristina from Belgrade to meet with Albanians Thursday.

Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of the principal ethnic Albanian party here, responded at a news conference today that he was prepared to begin a dialogue but had not seen details of the Serbian proposal. Rugova is under pressure from his constituents not to begin a public dialogue until the security situation returns to normal, and Gelbard has been urging both sides to begin their talks in secret.

[In Washington, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin criticized Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's conditional offer for talks and accused him of intransigence, the Reuters news agency reported. "We've seen no evidence other than this woefully inadequate discussion of possible dialogue that President Milosevic has got the message and is going to start talking rather than ordering the killing of Albanians," Rubin said.]

At his news conference, Rugova reiterated previous statements that he will insist that Kosovo be granted independence from Serbia, a position that Belgrade and Washington have rejected. He said gaining additional autonomy would be insufficient, and would only provoke more bloodshed.