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Former President Jimmy Carter traveled to Capitol Hill in June to urge the Senate to press for a peaceful end to the war in Bosnia.

President Carter testified jointly with Gen. John Galvin, former supreme allied commander in Europe and the first American representative to Bosnia after it declared its independence. In hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, they urged the Congress to use American influence to bring warring Muslims, Croats, and Serbs back to the negotiating table, rather than withdraw U.N. peacekeepers or lift the international arms embargo.

The hearing marked the first time President Carter had testified before a Congressional committee and made him the first former president since Harry Truman to testify on the Hill.

"The United Nations is facing an almost impossible dilemma," President Carter said, "serving as a peace enforcer where there is no peace . . . With almost no prospect for ending the crisis through military means, it is time to reassess the possibilities for a mediated settlement."

President Carter first pushed for such a settlement last December, when he traveled to the former Yugoslavia with his wife, Rosalynn, and Harry Barnes and Joyce Neu of The Carter Center's Conflict Resolution Program. The team brokered a four-month cease-fire and called on all sides to use the time to open peace talks in a neutral setting, under the auspices of the five-nation Contact Group.

The cease-fire passed, with sporadic fighting between both sides, and without further talks. It expired at the end of April and immediately gave way to a Bosnian offensive. Serb forces took several hundred U.N. peacekeepers hostage and shot down an American pilot flying a NATO mission in the region. The return to violence prompted many in Congress to renew their calls for a unilateral end to the U.N. arms embargo. President Carter and Gen. Galvin, however, advised restraint, echoing the testimony days before of Defense Secretary William Perry and Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I think if we do eventually decide to lift the arms embargo," said President Carter, "a prerequisite must be to exhaust the peace effort after good-faith attempts using the maximum influence of the Contact Group members to get both sides to sit down together. The United Nations forces also will have to be withdrawn before lifting the arms embargo."

But, he warned, "I think such a course would result . . . in a great chance of high levels of casualties, an increase in hatred and animosity, and maybe a spreading of the conflict outside Bosnia to neighboring countries."

"If we're going to lift the embargo," Gen. Galvin added, "we have got to be prepared for the kind of ugliness that is going to come--which is going to be a lot worse than perhaps what we've seen so far." Lifting the embargo, he said, "would be a fundamental mistake."

The key, President Carter and Gen. Galvin said, is to resume talks without extensive preconditions. They urged the Contact Group and the Muslim-Croat Federation to be flexible in their insistence of a 51-49 percent split of the region, noting that the Bosnian Serbs have offered to reduce their holdings to 53 percent of the former Yugoslavia. That 4 percent difference is too small, President Carter said, to scuttle talks before they begin.

"We want to make it clear," President Carter said, "that we do not excuse or condone any of the human rights abuses, the violation of cease-fires, the taking of hostages, or the failure to comply with U.N. resolutions by any of the combatants in the area. But it's a tragedy," he said, "that the whole thing could break down on the basis of . . . semantics."