Slobodan Milosevic wanted to carve a "Greater Serbia" out of the ruins of Yugoslavia, the first head of state to testify at the Hague war crimes tribunal said yesterday.
Stipe Mesic, the president of Croatia, took over the rotating Yugoslav presidency in July 1991 shortly before Tito's federation collapsed into eight years of war and ethnic cleansing.
Mr Mesic avoided eye contact with Mr Milosevic as he entered the courtroom.
He is the first in a series of high-profile public figures among some 170 witnesses being called by UN prosecutors in the Hague.
"What he [Milosevic] was interested in was a 'Greater Serbia' that would be created on the ruins of the former Yugoslavia," Mr Mesic told the three-man bench. "Milosevic said he was fighting for Yugoslavia, but he was doing everything to destroy it."
Cross-examined by Geoffrey Nice, the tribunal's British lead counsel, Mr Mesic said that Mr Milosevic had agreed to the secession of the Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia because he wanted to carve up the country on ethnic lines. But Slovenia, unlike Croatia, had no Serb minority.
"The Serbs in Croatia were only needed to ignite the fuse in order for the war to be transferred to [neighbouring] Bosnia Herzegovina," he said. "With regard to Croatia, whatever territory could be wrested from it would be joined to Greater Serbia."
Mr Milosevic is facing 61 charges, including genocide, the gravest of war crimes, in this Bosnia and Croatia stage of the trial. The first part dealt with Kosovo.
Lawyers say it should be easier to convict him for crimes committed in Kosovo - when he was Yugoslav president and had clear "command responsibility" - than for the two earlier wars, when he was president of Serbia and "parallel chains of command" existed for the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs.
True to form, a combative Mr Milosevic attacked his former colleague and adversary as a "problematic" witness "because of his criminal role in destroying Yugoslavia".
Mr Mesic said Mr Milosevic took control of the Yugoslav federal budget, funded by all member states, and used the National Bank to fund Serb forces in Croatia and later Bosnia. He also reviewed the minutes of a meeting of the Yugoslav presidency in July 1991 at which he warned that Mr Milosevic intended to conquer Croatia. "That can happen only through a horrible war and in blood," he said at the meeting. "Croatia will never relinquish a centimetre of its land to Serbia."
In October 1991, Mr Mesic said, he pleaded for UN intervention, warning: "The army has become exclusively Serb and Milosevic is tearing down the Yugoslav federation."
Asked to describe Mr Milosevic's character, he said: "I never saw him show any emotions... He could have desisted from the option of war, but he never took any action to stop it."
Last week, in the opening statement for this phase of the trial, Mr Milosevic - who is defending himself - rejected charges that he masterminded a plan to purge non-Serbs from Serb-dominated areas of Croatia and Bosnia.
Mr Mesic's appearance in court came at a time when the Croatian government is at loggerheads with the UN tribunal, refusing to hand over General Janko Bobetko, the country's retired former army chief of staff who is indicted for war crimes against Serb civilians and wounded soldiers.