Manolic, who on Monday began his testimony as a prosecution witness at the ICTY trial against Prlic and others, today said that the main goal of Tudjman's policy towards Bosnia was to annex western Herzegovina "as this is ethnically pure Croat-populated area adjacent to the border with Croatia".
According to Manolic, Tudjman's policy was carried out by "Herzegovina's lobby" in the leadership of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). In this context he mentioned the late Gojko Susak, a former Croatia defence minister, Vice Vukojevic and Ivic Pasalic, a former high-ranking HDZ officials, and the late Mate Boban from Herzegovina and Dario Kordic from central Bosnia, as well as other former Bosnian Croat officials at whose trial he is testifying, as the leading proponents of this policy.
Reiterating his position that attempts to partition Bosnia were a wrong policy, Manolic said that when he had broken up with with Tudjman over this issue, he was dismissed from the office of the speaker of the upper house of the Croatian parliament. After that he and Stjepan Mesic, the current Croatian President, left the HDZ.
Manolic said that the above-mentioned Herzegovinian lobby saw the 1993 Croat-Muslim conflict in Bosnia as a way out for its policy.
The witness confirmed that parts of Croatia's armed forces had been deployed in Bosnia, but their engagement was secret and there were no documents that could confirm it.
Manolic does not think that Croatia can be accused of the aggression against Bosnia, but that only "the supreme commander (Tudjman) at the time and the defence minister (Susak) should be held accountable for it".
This was a case of abuse of office in a bid to accomplish objectives which were not objectives of the country, Manolic added.
He told the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague that detention camps for Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) had been secretly set up and that as soon as he heard of their existence, President Tudjman ordered that they be closed.
The witness is continuing his testimony this week at the trial of of Jadranko Prlic, Milivoj Petkovic, Slobodan Praljak, Bruno Stojic, Valentin Coric and Berislav Pusic, whom this UN tribunal accuses of war crimes which they perpetrated while they used to be top political and military leaders of Herceg-Bosna during the Croat-Muslim conflict in 1993.