Thirty years after the Srebrenica genocide, a placeholder memorial was unveiled in The Hague in July 2025.
Its unveiling marked an important step in the Netherlands’ acknowledgement of its painful connection to the Srebrenica genocide. One year later, during the thirty-first commemoration on 11 July 2026, a thirty-first piece of natural stone was added to the site, one for each year since the genocide.
The Hague is the City of Peace and Justice, home to the ICJ and the former ICTY. Yet its collective memory is also inseparable from the Dutchbat mission and the Dutch state’s acknowledged mistakes surrounding Srebrenica. And as the city has become home to survivors and refugees from the Bosnian conflict, a question needs to be asked: how can a memorial here meaningfully commemorate what happened?
A Coalition of Survivors, Veterans, and Citizens
The driving force behind the memorial’s realisation is the Stichting Nationaal Monument Srebrenica Genocide ’95 (NMSG ’95), led by Samir Hajdarević. The idea of a national monument, he explains, has been pursued since 1996, when commemorations for the Srebrenica genocide began in The Hague, alongside calls for 11 July to be officially recognised as a day of national remembrance.
The movement gained momentum in 2020, during the twenty-fifth commemoration of the genocide. In the weeks leading up to 11 July, a working group within the National Commemoration Committee brought together representatives of the survivors’ association and Dutchbat III for a joint meeting with Minister of Defence Ank Bijleveld. By doing so, they made clear they shared the same goal of establishing a national monument, challenging the stigma that these two groups were unable to cooperate. Around the 25th commemoration in July 2020, Mayor Jan van Zanen expressed the municipality’s support for the monument. From that moment on, Hajdarević adds, a broad coalition united behind the project, including the Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs, and the municipalities of Rotterdam and The Hague.
The ambition was a permanent monument, ideally linked to the ICTY building and complemented by a knowledge and information centre. Yet the sensitivity of the location created delays. Rather than waiting indefinitely, it was agreed in early 2025 to move forward with a placeholder memorial: a symbolic object standing in for the future monument and documentation centre. Designed and realised in just five months, it was unveiled on 11 July 2025.
The Placeholder Memorial
How a memorial is created is as important as the final structure itself, argues Sabina Tanović, architect and scholar focused on difficult heritage and memorial architecture who sits on the advisory group of NMSG ’95. The current placeholder, a memorial artefact inaugurated in front of the former Yugoslavia Tribunal building, consists of three elements: a vertical memorial stone, a horizontal sequence of natural stones embedded in the pavement, now numbering thirty-one, and an information board explaining the process and the significance of the location.
The process of its creation adds to its meaning. Remnant material, made from the same stone used for the memorial gravestones in Potočari, was collectively broken by hand at The Hague’s city hall into more than eight thousand fragments by survivors, relatives, Dutchbat veterans, municipal leaders, and passers-by, with each piece representing one individual murdered in the genocide. Tanović describes this communal act as establishing a symbolic connection between those who participated and those being commemorated, both metaphorically and literally.
The placeholder, she explains, is not passive but active: it facilitates mourning in public space, pays tribute, and educates. At the time of the unveiling, Tanović explained how the memorial would also function as a timeline. “The thirty stones in the pavement,” she notes, “symbolise the thirty years since the genocide, which are also thirty years without an official national memorial. Each year, another stone will be added until the planned memorial and information-documentation centre are realised.” On 11 July 2026, that timeline advanced for the first time when a thirty-first piece of natural stone was added.
Looking Forward to a Permanent National Monument
The thirty-first stone now makes the passage of another year visible. But how many more will be added before a permanent structure is realised? The answer to that question is not so straightforward. The main obstacle in recent years has been the location, and it is an obstacle that remains, even with a placeholder now in place.
For survivors and victims’ relatives, Hajdarević explains, there is no more fitting site for a memorial than the area adjacent to the former ICTY building, ideally incorporating the structure itself. Yet the building does not fall under municipal authority. It is owned by the Dutch central government, and part of it is currently leased to a United Nations institution, the IRMCT, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, which handles the remaining work of the ICTY and ICTR. As David de Haan, the municipal official responsible for guiding The Hague’s monument policies, notes, this makes any intervention diplomatically and bureaucratically complex.
Because no definitive decision was taken at the national level, NMSG ’95 received neither a clear approval nor a rejection during all their years of lobbying. In early 2025, with the thirtieth commemoration approaching, all parties agreed to move forward with a temporary placeholder that would not require altering state-controlled land. The memorial was therefore placed on a small municipal strip of pavement, carefully selected to avoid jurisdictional complications.
The placeholder carries a ten-year permit, creating an informal timeframe for progress towards a permanent national memorial. The municipality of The Hague now points to the national government to take the next steps, while a parliamentary motion adopted in March 2026 calls on the government to continue its efforts to ensure the establishment of a permanent memorial and support NMSG ’95’s ambitions. However, later that month, the House of Representatives rejected an amendment that would have allocated €500,000 to the monument’s further development.
At the same time, the IRMCT is working towards the completion and transfer of several of its remaining functions, while the Dutch government is considering future uses for the former tribunal building. This uncertainty over the grounds of the former Tribunal Building is more than a planning issue. It is about what it means to commemorate Srebrenica in The Hague, and about international justice and the Dutch state’s own reckoning with Srebrenica.
The Hague: A City of Justice and Failure
The fact that the memorial stands in The Hague adds another layer to how the victims of the genocide are commemorated. The Hague, the “City of Peace and Justice,” is home to the International Court of Justice and the former ICTY, but it is also the city associated with Dutchbat, political missteps, and decades of national introspection. How does one meaningfully commemorate the Srebrenica genocide here? And how can the Dutch perspective be present without eclipsing the Bosnian one?
The memorial is, first and foremost, for the victims of the genocide and their relatives. That, above all, is what Hajdarević emphasises. Yet, as Erna Rijsdijk, a scholar at the Netherlands Defence Academy who is involved in the Facing Srebrenica project, which brings together survivors and Dutchbat veterans in participatory forms of remembrance, and who is also a member of the NMSG ’95 advisory board, argues, acknowledging what went wrong on the Dutch side can strengthen rather than weaken recognition of the victims, precisely because it situates their suffering within the broader system that failed to prevent it. If the Netherlands is willing to confront its own role without defensiveness, it does not shift attention away from Bosnian loss. Instead, it places that loss within the moral and institutional landscape that made it possible.
Rijsdijk links this directly to the importance of the monument’s location. She argues that placing the monument next to the former ICTY building matters not only because it is where the genocide was prosecuted, but because it connects Dutch memory to international justice and reminds visitors that responsibility does not end at national borders. In her words, “while the Netherlands must face its own role, the genocide itself emerged from an exclusionary nationalist ideology whose dangers are not limited to the Balkans of the 1990s but resonate today, as extremist movements gain ground in many Western societies.” If a memorial in The Hague can hold these truths together, she suggests, it has the potential to shift remembrance from a purely national self-examination towards a shared civic responsibility, while keeping the victims’ suffering at its centre.
The placeholder was unveiled in 2025 as an important first step towards a permanent memorial. The addition of the thirty-first stone one year later showed how the site can make the passage of time visible, but also how the wait continues. It remains unclear when, and in what form, a permanent national memorial will follow. For now, the placeholder makes that uncertainty visible, one stone and one year at a time.
