The first head of state to testify at Mr Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial accused him today of engineering the break up of Yugoslavia and using the army to seize Croat land in the pursuit of a "Greater Serbia".
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Milosevic: Accused of engineering the break up of Yugoslavia
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Croatian President Stjepan Mesic, who took over the rotating Yugoslav presidency in July 1991, said Mr Milosevic invoked the threat of war in his plan to "restructure" Yugoslavia.
The former Serbian president faces 61 charges, including genocide, in this key Bosnia and Croatia stage of the biggest international war crimes trial since Nuremberg.
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"I'm quite certain that Milosevic did not favour any kind of Yugoslavia that was federal or confederal. What he was interested in was a Greater Serbia built on the ruins of Yugoslavia," Mr Mesic (67) told the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Prosecutors accuse 61-year-old Milosevic of genocide in Bosnia and crimes against humanity in Croatia in a scheme to create an ethically pure Greater Serbia in the early 1990s.
The court heard minutes from a 1991 meeting of the rotating federal presidency in which then-president Mr Mesic - who held the Yugoslav post for just a few months before resigning - warned of Serbian imperialism.
"Gentlemen what they want is territory. They want to grab Croatian land and trick the army into doing it for them," prosecutor Mr Geoffrey Nice quoted Mr Mesic as saying during the meeting with representatives of the army and the five other Yugoslav republics.