"Martic ordered closing the motorway at Okucani, which was an act of provocation and violation of the UN agreement. (...) On 1 May 1995 Croatia mounted a combined military and police operation called Flash, opening the motorway by force and taking the area which until then had been held by the Serbs," Babic said.
Babic, former prime minister and president of the self-styled Serb statelet within Croatia known as the Republic of the Serb Krajina (RSK), was sentenced by the Hague tribunal to 13 years' imprisonment in 2004 after pleading guilty to the expulsion of Croatian civilians from Serb-occupied areas of Croatia.
Babic said that on the second day of Operation Flash Martic ordered a missile attack on Zagreb in retaliation for the Croatian offensive, which he later publicly admitted in a statement to Bosnian Serb television.
Prosecutor Alex Whiting played a portion of a secretly recorded conversation between RSK prime minister Borislav Mikelic and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, in which Milosevic blamed Martic for provoking the Croatian offensive and described him as an "unintelligent autocrat" and a "dangerous criminal".
At the prosecutor's urging, Babic concluded his four-day-long testimony with an explanation why in January 2004 he pleaded guilty to the charge of prosecution as a crime against humanity.
"In 1991 I succumbed to the passions of politics and ethnoegoism. I believed that it was possible to achieve the goal set by Milosevic -- to create a single state for all the Serbs. I thought it could be achieved through ethnic separation without the use of force and with the support of a majority of the population. (...) I incited distrust and hatred among the Serb people towards the Croatian state. (...) I was a popular top politician who won public confidence and created institutions. When the war started and I saw that a Serb state was being created by force, by expelling the Croats, I kept silent about it and continued performing my public duties. I could have stepped down, resigned, but I stayed in office and became jointly responsible for what happened in the Krajina," Babic said.
Responding to a question put by presiding judge Bakone Justice Moloto, Babic said he shared responsibility for the crimes because he had been involved in the creation of state and defence institutions, but noted that he had not personally ordered any crime.
Martic, 60, who served as interior and defence minister and president of the RSK, is charged with 19 counts of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war committed in Croatia in 1991-95, war crimes committed in western Bosnia in 1994, and the shelling of Zagreb in May 1995.