BELGRADE, Jan 29 (AFP) - Serbia has offered to resume dialogue with Kosovo over practical issues, interrupted since anti-Serb violence last March, a Serbian government body in charge with Kosovo said Saturday.

Belgrade's top official dealing with the issues in Kosovo, Nebojsa Covic "proposed the stalemate in the dialogue to be overcome by reactivation of working groups for missing persons and energy," the government's Center for Kosovo said in a statement.

Kosovo is technically part of Serbia but has been a UN protectorate since NATO intervened to end the 1998-99 war between Serbian forces and separatist guerrillas from the province's ethnic Albanian majority seeking independence, which Belgrade considers unacceptable.

The leaders of Kosovo and Serbia held their first face-to-face talks since the war in Vienna in October 2003, agreeing to launch an ongoing dialogue on matters of mutual concern such as energy, communications and the return of refugees.

But the process was badly undermined after violent anti-Serb riots erupted in the province in March, leaving 19 dead and some 900 injured. Thousands of Serbs were forced to flee their homes, in addition to the more than 200,000 who have left since the UN arrived in the province.

In a letter sent to the chief international official in the province, UN administrator Soren Jessen-Petersen, Covic also asked for an urgent meeting to discuss reconstruction of dozens of churches destroyed in the March violence, the statement added.

The talks on Kosovo's final status are expected to start later this year under UN auspices, but the international community has been insisting that Belgrade and Pristina first have dialogue on practical issues.