Was HIV a man-made virus used to target specific populations?

Nope.

No, it was a zoonosis, a disease that affected animals, in this case monkeys whuch were hunted and eaten, so calked "bush meat ", which mutated to be able to infect humans where it became more virulent.

I don't think there was any attempt to create a disease to kill targeted populations. However, back in the eighties, Rolling Stone ran an article where it seems the earliest breakout of the disease was right in the area of Africa where in the 1950s research for a polio vaccine was taking place. Primates were used in this research. In this hypothesis, primate blood got intermixed somehow with human blood products, and the animal disease got transmitted into the human population at that point.

I must admit that I have not followed the story all that closely. There have been several statements and articles claiming to debunk that theory, but then, backaways the tobacco industry also had some research "debunking" the tie between smoking and lung cancer.

The only thing I can add is that despite claims to the contrary, medical researchers can sometimes be extraordinarily sloppy with their work. Gajdusek, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the agent that causes kuru disease in Papua New Guinea and mad cow disease, (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE), did some work on it in a research center outside Washington DC, and later it came out that standards were remarkably sloppy in that center. And that was in Washington DC, not Africa in the 1950s, where keeping high research standards would be more difficult.

So I'm just putting the hypothesis out there about AIDS being an accidental byproduct of polio research in Africa, I don't actually know one way or the other.