Three former Yugoslav army officers allowed soldiers under their command to carry out mass murder in the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991, prosecutors said at the start of their trial today.
Mile Mrksic (R), Miroslav Radic (L) and Veselin Sljivancanin, known as the 'Vukovar Three' at the UN's War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague
Prosecutor Marks Moore said the men - known as the "Vukovar Three" - ignored orders from their superiors to ensure that soldiers carried out no acts of retribution and, as a result, were complicit in one of the worst atrocities of the Balkan wars.
The executions followed a brutal three-month siege of Croatia's easternmost town, close to the border with Serbia, by local Serb rebels reinforced by Yugoslav army troops and artillery, which reduced much of the town to rubble.
More than 200 people were killed in the massacre after being removed from a hospital in the town and taken to a farm where they were shot and buried in a mass grave.
Mile Mrksic, Miroslav Radic and Veselin Sljivancanin are accused of crimes against humanity and of violations of the laws or customs of war. They have pleaded not guilty.
"The failure of the accused to prevent or punish their subordinates makes them criminally liable," Mr Moore told the court. He added that the men had clearly breached an agreement to evacuate the hospital under the auspices of the International Red Cross.
Up to 2,000 people, including the families of hospital staff and some Croatian soldiers, sought refuge in the hospital, in the belief they would be evacuated in the presence of international observers.
Anticipating retribution and acts of revenge by local Serbs after the fall of Vukovar in November 1991, Mrksic's superior officer had ordered that all aspects of the Geneva Convention be observed and all acts of retribution or revenge be punished.
"The language was plain as a pikestaff", Mr Moore said.
Instead, local armed Serbs were allowed into the hospital on November 19th where they started abusing and beating patients.
In spite of protests by the head of the hospital, soldiers separated the men from the women, taking about 400 people from the facility and then transporting 300 to a farm building in nearby Ovcara.
There, the captives were beaten for several hours and afterwards transported in groups of about 10 to 20 to a site close by. At least 264 people, most of them Croatians, were killed and their bodies bulldozed into a mass grave.
The case of the Vukovar massacre was one of the first investigations of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia after it was set up by a UN Security Council resolution in 1993.