In October 1975 Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, speaking to the French newspaper Le Monde, remarked on the controversy surrounding the future of the Spanish Sahara (Western Sahara), then claimed by Morocco and Mauritania. “Self-determination for 40,000 nomads?” he asked. “Let's not exaggerate.” Western Sahara was “a little phantom state” best absorbed by its neighbours lest it destabilise the region and invite intervention by the United States or the Soviet Union. A few weeks later, following a massive march to the border of the territory by hundreds of thousands of Moroccan citizens and a veiled threat of invasion, the Spanish government negotiated the handover of Western Sahara to Morocco and Mauritania, a move resisted by the armed, Algerian-backed Polisario independence movement, and opposed by the International Court of Justice in a landmark ruling. The predictable panoply of human rights abuses (as understood in the West, at least) followed: forced displacement of ethnic Sahrawi, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, torture and murder, little noticed because they took place in a sparsely populated territory whose claim to self-determination remained unresolved and in the context of what the Polisario termed a war of national liberation.

Halfway around the world, at almost the exact same time, Indonesian forces were preparing to invade the former Portuguese territory of Timor- Leste.