By Matt Robinson

PEC, Serbia, March 29 (Reuters) - The last time the dead left Kosovo in any great number it was 1999.

They were ethnic Albanians, hundreds of them, stuffed into freezer trucks and driven north by Serbian police to be bulldozed into pits or tipped into the Danube river.

Now, as Kosovo Albanians draw closer to independence from Serbia, Serbs are taking their own dead, too.

Twelve were exhumed from the City Cemetery in this western Kosovo town last year and driven across the boundary between the U.N.-run province and Serbia proper. Three have been moved from the Serbian Orthodox cemetery in the capital Pristina this year.

Milorad, Milivoje and Savo Besovic are the first from Pec in 2007. It is a rate not seen since the end of the 1998-99 war and the rapid departure of thousands of Serb refugees.

Police watched as gravedigger Zoran Radosavljevic, masked and wearing white overalls, lowered himself into the burial tomb on Thursday morning and wrenched out the first white bag.

It seemed surprisingly light, and flopped into a coffin balanced on the fresh mound of earth.

"People want their dead close by," he said later by phone as he drove the bodies into Serbia. "Sometimes the graves have been desecrated and people simply lose all trace."

Another two exhumations were planned for next week.

Like others in Kosovo, the town of Pec at the foot of the mountainous Albanian border was emptied of Serbs in 1999, as Belgrade pulled its forces from the southern Serbian province.

Ten thousand Albanians died and almost one million fled Serbia's 1998-99 war with separatist guerrillas, a crackdown that drew NATO into its first "humanitarian" air war to wrest control of the territory from late strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

WESTERN POLITICS

Around half Kosovo's prewar Serb population fled a wave of revenge attacks. Some 100,000 remain, looking to the future with uncertainty as the Western powers behind the 1999 bombing campaign push to give Kosovo independence.

The U.N. Security Council is expected to sit next week to begin debating an independence plan drafted by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, reportedly on April 3.

Two relatives, Dragica and Dusanka, watched in silence, dressed head to toe in black. An Albanian gravedigger covered his face and told the camera to turn away, worried he might be seen digging a Serb grave in an area known for its hardliners.

Asked why the need to move the dead now, Dusanka replied:

"Because on the third, the Security Council will sit, and the politics of the West is such that whatever they say, that's how it will be. They won't ask you or me.

Dusanka, 60, left Kosovo 38 years ago, part of a decades-long Serb exodus from the province that fueled Milosevic's campaign in the 1990s to reassert control over land steeped in religious and historical significance for Serbs.

The United Nations has had little success in encouraging Serbs to return, despite statistics that suggest security is vastly improved. U.N. agencies and the 16,500-strong NATO peace force are braced for a fresh exodus if the U.N. Security Council avoids a Russian veto and votes for independence by the summer.

"Once we all lived here," said Dusanka. "Then the first one left, and the rest followed, like sheep."

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