Pressure is mounting on the Dutch government to decide on a location in The Hague for a national monument to commemorate the genocide at Srebrenica ahead of the 30th anniversary ceremony next year.

The association National Monument Srebrenica has been calling for a monument and information centre for the last five years in honour of the 8,000 Muslim men and boys who were killed and deported at the so-called UN safe haven in 1995 during the Yugoslav wars.

Dutch UNPROFOR troops, better known as Dutchbat III, were incapable of stopping Ratko Mladic’s troops from carrying out the massacre.

The Hague local council and the government are in favour of a monument but are dragging their feet over the association’s preferred location of the Churchillplein, site of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

“It is an iconic place, which symbolises the justice that has been done in this country for the crimes of 1995. Many victims and relatives of the dead travelled to this place as witnesses and that is why it is so charged with emotion,” chair of the association Samir Hajdarevic told broadcaster NOS.

The site could also house an information centre, Hajdarevic said. “Our dream is to have an information centre like the one that created after World War II following the Nuremberg trials. The courtroom could become a museum and the archives opened up to visitors and scholars,” he said.

A spokesman for the government said an unidentified international organisation has expressed an interest in the tribunal building, which currently stands empty. Large numbers of visitors to the monument could compromise the organisation’s security, he said.

The Hague city council is looking for a temporary location which, the association fears, will push the Churchillplein plan further into the background.