Inzko urged the resumption of tripartite talks after Sunday's meeting in Banja Luka between Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, the president of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), and Dragan Covic, the chief of the Bosnia's Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ BiH).
The third participant in the Prud meeting, Sulejman Tihic representing the (Muslim) Party of Democratic Action (SDA), decided to boycott today's talks due to Dodik's behaviour which Tihic interprets as acts breaching the Dayton agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia in 1995.
On Saturday, SDA said in a press release that Tihic would not participate in talks with Covic and Dodik in the future until Inzko's office punished Dodik and the Bosnian Serb entity for thwarting the demands of the international community that the entity's authorities scrap a decision to re-examine powers previously transferred onto the country's central government.
Inzko said today that the Prud process enjoyed backing of the European Union's High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Javier Solana, other officials of the European Commission and U.S. Vice-President Joseph Biden who welcomed the fact that this process ha been initiated by local politicians.
Inzko said that he would convene the next meeting of the Prud troika ahead of a meeting of the Peace Implementation Council for Bosnia-Herzegovina in his bid to see to it that progress be made which this Austrian diplomat described as important for Bosnia's integration with Europe.
"For us, it is beyond question that Bosnia-Herzegovina should be a country aspiring to join the European Union and a country in which all the three peoples (Bosniaks or Muslims, Croats and Serbs) are equal," Covic said after the talks in Banja Luka.
Both Covic and Dodik expressed hope that tripartite talks would be resumed.
"Therefore I have come here today so as to try solve our problems through direct talks which absolutely have no alternative," Covic said.
The Bosnian Croat leader added that he had decided to come to Banja Luka for talks after consulting Solana and the US Embassy in Bosnia-Herzegovina.