The West Pakistani officials didn’t get why there was so much fuss about that. I interviewed a lot of them. They were in a prison in Comilla and in pretty miserable circumstances. And they were saying, ‘What are they going on about? What were we supposed to have done? It was a war!’.

On 15 December 2017, the distinguished Korean judge, O-Gon Kwon, began his three-year term as President of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In addition to outstanding service as a judge in his home country, the Republic of Korea, Judge Kwon was a permanent judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for almost fifteen years. Judge Kwon served as the Vice-President of the ICTY (2008 to 2011), as a member of the Referral Bench, and also tried some of the tribunal’s most complex and challenging cases. He presided over the trial of the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadžić, and sat as a judge on the trial of the former President of the Republic of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević. Judge Kwon also adjudicated the case of seven Bosnian Serbs in Popović et al, all accused of crimes associated with the fall of the Srebrenica enclave in July 1995.

This contribution will engage with an aspect of the many issues of international humanitarian law (IHL) arising from the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, and 1999 retreat. It will rely for the factual assertions on the report of the East Timor Reception, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CAVR), Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação de Timor Leste in Portuguese. This report is called Chega! (the exclamation mark is deliberate, and Chega! means ‘no more, stop, enough’). It contains the only detailed account of the intra-Timorese civil war of 1974–1975, followed by the invasion and occupation by, and eventual departure, of Indonesia from the one-time Portuguese non-self-governing territory. Certain limitations must be acknowledged. Important as it is, Chega! does suffer from the fact that Indonesia did not participate.

The many islands that form the Republic of Indonesia are no strangers to armed conflict and extreme violence. The inhabitants of the archipelago have borne the brunt of foreign aggression, notably in the form of Dutch colonialism and the Japanese occupation during World War II. They have seen a vicious war of independence from the Netherlands that was both accompanied and followed by years of non-international armed conflict (NIAC) such as that surrounding the Communist uprising in Madiun in 1948, the religious Darul Islam revolt (1948–1962), the Pemesta (Piagam Perjuangan Semesta) movement centred in Manado (1957–1961) and the rebellion of the revolutionary government of the Republic of Indonesia (Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia, PRRI) (1958).