UN Secretary General Kofi Annan opened high-level talks here on Thursday with senior African Union officials to seek solutions to the crisis in Sudan's troubled western Darfur region.
But prospects for the meeting reaching consensus on a way forward, particularly on the key question of transferring the cash-strapped AU mission in Darfur to the United Nations, remained unclear.
Sudan is vehemently opposed to a UN role despite an AU endorsement of the transfer that the pan-African body itself requested and efforts to convince Khartoum to ease its stance have thus far yielded no success.
A day after saying in neighbouring Kenya that he still hoped to send UN peacekeepers to Darfur, Annan was meeting in Ethiopia with AU commission chief Alpha Oumar Konare and AU Peace and Security Council chief Said Djinnit.
Also attending were Sudanese Foreign Minister Lam Akol, representatives from Gabon and Congo, the current AU chair, and the Arab League, officials said.
"We have not given up on UN presence in Darfur," Annan said Wednesday while attending a UN climate change conference in Nairobi.
"We need to continue efforts to calm Darfur, to get assistance to the internally displaced and to gain access for humanitarian workers," he said, adding that UN staff might also be sent to neighbouring Chad.
"We are looking at putting some sort of international presence on the border with Chad to ensure cross-border attacks are minimal," Annan said.
One AU official predicted the talks would not produce significant results in addressing the escalating unrest in Darfur that has raged for more than three years, mainly because Annan will leave his post at year's end.
"This meeting may not yield much," the official who is close to Konare told AFP on condition of anonymity. "Everyone is holding to their position and knows that Kofi Annan is on his way out."
A UN official said Sudan has already made contact with Ban Ki-Moon, the South Korean foreign minister who will replace Annan as the head of the world body in January 1, 2007.
Sudan says handing the AU mission to the United Nations threatens its sovereignty and risks worsening the situation in Darfur where at least 200,000 people have been killed and about 2.5 million others displaced by the war.
It instead favours a reinforced and expanded AU mission, the mandate for which was to have expired on September 30 but has since been extended to the end of the year.