Pressure mounted yesterday on ultra-nationalist Serbs and Croats in Bosnia not to boycott this weekend's municipal elections, with the European Union and France threatening to suspend aid and the United States considering similar steps.
International officials involved in organising the controversial polls scheduled for Saturday and Sunday insisted meanwhile that the vote will go ahead despite the threat of a boycott.
"The municipal elections will take place," said Mr David Foley, spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which is supervising the polls. "Parties who choose not to take part will simply lose the elections," he said.
In Brussels, the European Commission denounced as "complete nonsense" a claim by the main Bosnian Croat party that there had been problems with the registration of refugees living abroad.
The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), which won the overwhelming support of ethnic Croats in last year's general elections, called for a boycott on Tuesday, saying the conditions for the poll had not been met. The Bosnian Serb parliament, ruled by hard-liners, met yesterday to decide whether to boycott the vote.
A European Commission spokesman said Brussels strongly condemns the ultra-nationalist stance and is considering blocking new aid to the Bosnian Croat regions through international financial institutions such as the European Reconstruction Bank.
In Paris, the foreign ministry spokesman, Mr Jacques Rummelhardt, said France would also favour suspending aid to local authorities which refuse to take part in the elections.
In Britain, the Foreign Office urged the Croat party to reverse its decision. NATO peacekeepers screened 72 Bosnian Serb hard-liners for suspected war crimes after detaining them in Banja Luka, but released them all after the checks, the US mediator, Mr Jacques Klein, said yesterday.
The hard-liners were rescued on Tuesday from a hotel in the north Bosnian town where they were trapped by 2,000 supporters of the western-backed President, Ms Biljana Plavsic. Senior members of the ruling hard-line SDS party of the indicted war criminal, Mr Radovan Karadzic, were forced to flee the town by demonstrators.