Reburying Kosovo’s Dead

The shrouded bodies lay in coffins Wednesday on the edge of a sloping field thick with mud, where Serbian police using a bulldozer had covered the corpses the night before with a thin layer of dirt.

Villagers gathered throughout the frigid day to recover the mangled bodies, identify those that could be identified and place them, one by one, back into the ground.

Fifty-two mounds of chopped earth formed three neat rows, with a piece of wood planted on each grave to serve as a tombstone. When the villagers ran out of wood, they used broken tree limbs.

Six hours after they started, ethnic Albanians from several nearby villages finished the task of burying 52 of the men, women and children killed in the deadliest spasm of violence to rack Serbia’s restive province of Kosovo since World War II.

The ad hoc gravediggers were careful to turn each body’s head toward the Islamic holy city of Mecca, in keeping with Muslim tradition. Other elements of Muslim ritual, such as cleansing the body, were left undone in the haste and chaos of the burial. Most Albanians are Muslim.

“This time we used coffins,” said Xhafer Murtezaj, a local Albanian official. “Normally, we wouldn’t [in Muslim burial], but these are the circumstances.”

Over the objections of victims’ families, Serbian police had retrieved the bodies from a makeshift morgue Tuesday night and dumped them in the shallow mass grave here in Prekaze, a village that was at the center of last week’s deadly police crackdown on Albanian separatists.

Police, who claim that women and children among the victims were killed in the “cross-fire” between police and guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, wanted to quickly dispose of the bodies. The families initially had sought autopsies by international forensic experts to validate their belief that many of the dead were tortured and executed. People who inspected the bodies say several bore signs of close-range attack.

The mass burial by police further angered the Albanians, who saw it as a cruel indignity heaped atop the violence. Under the watch of police who manned bunkers inside the village and periodically drove by in royal-blue armored personnel carriers, hundreds of Albanians arrived on foot Wednesday to give proper interment to their dead.

“We are today burying our martyrs,” Zekirja Cana, a white-haired teacher, said after calling for a minute of silence. The villagers bowed their heads, then shouted: “Honor!”

“We are today burying children. Babies. Old women. Old people,” Cana continued in the brief ceremony. “A terrible massacre as a civilized world watches.”

Two women whose father was among the dead wept, and seven older men in traditional skullcaps said a prayer over the graves.

Most of the nearly 2 million Albanians who make up 90% of Kosovo’s population have for years bitterly resented the Serbian police authority imposed on them and want an independent state. The crackdown by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has only deepened their rage and alienation, making a political solution more elusive.

Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of the Albanians’ largest political party, refused to say Wednesday whether he would enter into talks with Yugoslav authorities, who made a belated offer of dialogue the day before. But Rugova stuck by his demand for nothing short of full independence for the province. Most Western governments say that position is unrealistic and that the best Kosovo’s Albanians can hope for is broad autonomy, a status they had until 1989.

“Independence could calm the region,” Rugova said at a news conference Wednesday in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. “Autonomy would only be a source of new conflicts.”

In Washington, the Clinton administration dismissed as “woefully inadequate” Milosevic’s offer of a dialogue and accused him of a cover-up for what it labeled his “outrageous decision” to order the mass burial before forensic investigations could be completed.

“This action suggests that President Milosevic has something to hide,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said.

Rubin said the six-nation Contact Group overseeing the Balkan peace process, which Monday imposed modest sanctions on the Milosevic government, will meet again March 25 in Washington to consider additional sanctions if aggression does not halt in Kosovo. Those probably would include a freezing of Yugoslav assets.

The rump Yugoslavia, which consists of the republics of Serbia and Montenegro, only recently has begun to emerge from years of sanctions imposed on it because of its role in fomenting war in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.

Milosevic, who ignored international condemnation to press last week’s police offensive, has maintained that the attacks were necessary to clamp down on Albanian separatists who have attacked dozens of police stations and local Serbian officials in the past year and a half.

Wednesday’s burials took place a few hundred yards from the compound belonging to the Jashari clan. Serbian authorities claim that Adem Jashari, who was killed in the offensive, was a principal leader of the armed separatists.

After the burials, the villagers walked in a long procession to the Jashari compound to inspect the ruins where 21 members of the clan were killed.

Six charred homes were heavily damaged by artillery fire. Gaping holes had been punched in the walls, and red tile roofs were shattered. Three dead cows lay under the pieces of what had been a barn.

Zoje Jashari, whose 65-year-old father, Shaban, was among the dead reburied on Wednesday, walked through her family home, weeping as her feet crunched the broken glass. She paused to retrieve a tape deck, and praised her relatives who gave their lives “for their country.”

Next door, Sadik Shute, 62, inspected the ruins of his nephews’ homes. Uneaten meals were rotting on a dining table; a trembling dog cowered nearby. Shoes of adults and children were scattered on the floors.

“I worked in the mines for 25 years to help build Yugoslavia,” Shute said, the sarcasm dripping from his words. “And now Yugoslavia is killing my children.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.