Topic summary
Green March
Spain
Morocco•
United States(logistical and diplomatic support)Prince Juan CarlosCarlos Arias Navarro Gen. Federico Gómez de SalazarHassan IIAhmed OsmanLight cavalry groups of the 3rd and 4th Thirds of the Legion
Expeditionary battalion of the Canary Infantry Regiment 50
Paratrooper and artillery units
c. 30,000 military and gendarmerie personnel escorting the march
c. 8,000–12,000 regular troops deployed along the northeastern border
The Green March (Arabic: المسيرة الخضراء, romanized: al-masīrat ul-khaḍrāʾ) was a strategic mass demonstration in November 1975, coordinated by the Moroccan government and the military, to force Spain to hand over the disputed, autonomous semi-metropolitan province of Spanish Sahara to Morocco. The Spanish government was preparing to abandon the territory as part of the decolonization of Africa, just as it had granted independence to Equatorial Guinea in 1968. The native inhabitants, the Sahrawi people, aspired to form an independent state. The demonstration of approximately 350,000 Moroccans advanced several kilometers into the Western Sahara territory. The operation also relied on logistical support and tacit approval from the United States Department of State and the CIA, as Washington and Paris, within the context of the Cold War, favored the integration of the territory into pro-Western Morocco over the emergence of an independent state potentially aligned with Algeria and the Eastern Bloc.
The Green March was condemned by the international community, notably in United Nations Security Council Resolution 380. The march was considered an attempt to bypass the International Court of Justice's Advisory opinion on Western Sahara that had been issued three weeks earlier. Morocco gained control of most of the former Spanish Sahara, which it still holds to this day. The refusal of the Sahrawi people to submit to the Moroccan monarchy shaped the Western Sahara conflict, still unresolved today, whose main episode was the Western Sahara War.