(11 Mar 1998) T/I: 10:48:44


Angry ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were on Wednesday (11/3) reburying victims of the recent Serbian offensives in the autonomy-seeking southern province. They said the Serbs had failed to deal respectfully with the bodies of their loved ones by not burying them in graves facing Mecca, which is the Muslim tradition. Instead, they complained,
the victims were buried in a large hole. The ethnic Albanians, who make up nine-tenths of Kosovo's population, exhumed the coffins and then reburied them according to local Muslim custom.
In the district of Prekaz, a WTN crew saw wrecked houses which the ethnic Albanians claim were destroyed by Serbian forces in their offensive against pro-independence sympathisers.
About 400 doctors and nurses demonstrated in front of the hospital in central Pristina on Wednesday against what they called unjustified actions taken by the Serbian police against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
They were also complaining about conditions for those being held by Serbian authorities and the lack of medical supplies for hospitals.

SHOWS:

PRISTINA, KOSOVO, SERBIA 11/03
WS International Red Cross vehicles outside ICRC headquarters;
MS ICRC jeeps;
CU ICRC sign on spare wheel;
CU ICRC headquarters sign on wall;
WS jeeps;

PREKAZ, KOSOVO, SERBIA 11/03
WS field where bodies are to be buried,
coffin on ground;
VS wrecked houses belonging to suspected KLA sympathisers;
WS tank and people on road outside house;
MS people walking;
WS people down road towards gravesites;
VS Albanians digging up coffins;
MS men carry body covered with blanket on stretcher

PRISTINA, KOSOVO, SERBIA 11/03
VS doctors and nurses with placards milling about;
MS doctor in white coat looks down on crowd from balcony;
MS people in crowd;
SOT Suzanna Manxhuka, pathologist (in English): "I am a doctor and we came here to protest against violence carried out by police, actually maybe the government, and we protest against the killing, the cruel way of massacring persons especially pregnant women and children. There were very many corpses in the morgue and the school, the pathology of medicine school";
MS doctors;

PRISTINA, KOSOVO, SERBIA 11/03
WS presser;
SOT Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovan Albanian leader (in Albanian with English translation): "Albanian forensic experts and pathologists were denied access to the area yesterday ... they wanted to examine the bodies of those killed, women, children and others (CA cameraman) and those innocent victims were not allowed to have a dignified burial ceremony";
WS press conference.

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