1 With a personal visit to Congress, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl is trying to temper legislators' zeal for lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnian government. He also is warning against abandoning Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
2 In a series of meetings Thursday that Kohl requested, he told members of the House and Senate that 'now is the wrong time' for the United States to act on its own to open the way for the Bosnians to obtain arms.
3 A U.N.-mandated arms embargo exists against all parties to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia. But the Serbs inherited the weapons of the Yugoslav army and are far better equipped than their rivals.
4 There is bipartisan support in Congress for helping the Bosnians obtain the arms to defend themselves. President Clinton has said he would like to see the embargo lifted but only through United Nations action.
5 Clinton and Kohl surveyed prospects for NATO's expansion and strengthening U.S. ties to Europe during a 2 1/2-hour meeting at the White House.
6 Under political pressure at home to take a hard line against Yeltsin for the heavy civilian toll in Chechnya, Kohl canceled a scheduled visit to Moscow this month and German Defense Minister Volker Ruehle excluded Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev from a security conference last weekend in Munich.
7 But for the West to say 'we give up on you, there's nothing that we can do here,' Kohl said after the White House meeting, 'that will immediately bring us back to the old, bad structures of the past. I don't want, in a few years ahead, to face the accusation that had we acted in time, and reasonably, we could have prevented this.'
8 Kohl repeated that appeal in a series of closed meetings with members of Congress.
9 'He couldn't make any promises Yeltsin would succeed, but he knew for sure that if Germany didn't continue and if we didn't continue to support Yeltsin, he would fail,' said Senator Joseph Biden, after listening to Kohl's appeal to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
10 'If Yeltsin fails we're all in trouble,' Biden said the chancellor told the senators.
11 Kohl said now was the time to pursue diplomatic initiatives to bring about a peace agreement in Bosnia. Biden, a supporter of lifting the arms embargo, said Kohl told the committee that if diplomacy doesn't work, he would be willing to reconsider lifting the embargo.
12 Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana, the senior Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, also met with Kohl and said the chancellor delivered a familiar message from Europeans: 'Don't lift the embargo, it would be a disaster to do it.'
13 Did Kohl sway anyone on Capitol Hill?
14 'I think his opinions are listened to carefully,' said Hamilton. 'The European point of view on Bosnia has largely been rejected by many of our people in the Congress.'

Clinton and Kohl surveyed prospects for NATO ' s expansion and strengthening U . S . ties to Europe during a 2 1 / 2 - hour meeting at the White House .
prospects
What are the prospects?