THE EUROPEAN Union's Irish presidency said last night that intensive efforts to solve the crisis in Mostar were continuing as a deadline on whether to end the EU's role in the divided city passed.
"The securing of agreement remains a matter of extreme urgency, it said in a statement released in Dublin.
The statement made no mention of an earlier decision to postpone the expiry of the EU's deadline on withdrawing its administration.
Feuding Muslims and Croats were expected to resume talks on a power-sharing agreement late last night after a day of fruitless negotiations, the European Union said.
Talks under EU mediation to resolve the impasse widely seen as threatening the whole concept of a multi-ethnic Bosnia broke up earlier in the evening.
But an EU source said late last night that mediators had been told the Croats were returning for a face-to-face meeting with the Muslims.
"We will kick the meeting off and ask them if they want us to stay. If they say `yes', we will. If not, we'll step outside the room and wait for the results, if any, like everyone else," the source said.
The announcement came after a day of desperate efforts to form a municipal government based on local election results failed to produce agreement.
"What is separating us is half a sentence," EU spokesman Dragan Gasic said earlier. "One side, the Muslims, have signed. Maybe in the next few hours the Croats will sign as well. But for the moment they have told us they would not."
"We've been negotiating the whole day today with the people who came here and by telephone and fax with the whole world, but we haven't reached an agreement," he told reporters.
Mostar's Muslim community won a slender majority of council seats in local elections held on June 20, but the Croats have refused to accept the result.
The two factions fought a bitter 10-month war in 1993-94 as a sideshow to the main Moslem-Serb conflict in Bosnia. Some of the worst fighting occurred in Mostar.
Diplomats fear that failure to implement the results of the Mostar poll could derail nationwide elections planned for Bosnia next month and make a mockery of international attempts to overcome hatreds between the main Muslim and Serb communities.
At the heart of the dispute lies the hardline nationalist Croats' refusal to accept the Muslim victory in the election for a new ethnically-mixed Mostar council.
The Croats boycotted the council over a voting irregularity that the EU ruled was too minor to affect the result.