300,000 March for Sahara: Morocco Claims Territory

King Hassan II mobilized 300,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians to march south toward Western Sahara on November 6, 1975, in a mass demonstration of territorial claim against Spanish colonial control. The Green March, named for the color of Islam, was a carefully orchestrated political maneuver. Participants were transported to the staging area near Tarfaya by government buses and trucks, and each marcher carried a Quran and a Moroccan flag. Hassan timed the march to exploit Spain's political weakness: Francisco Franco was on his deathbed, and the Spanish government was consumed by the coming succession crisis. The International Court of Justice had just issued an advisory opinion finding that while Morocco had historical ties to Western Sahara, those ties did not constitute sovereignty, and the territory's people had a right to self-determination. Hassan ignored the ruling and ordered the march forward. Spain, unwilling to fire on unarmed civilians and unable to manage a colonial war while transitioning to democracy, negotiated the Madrid Accords on November 14, dividing Western Sahara between Morocco and Mauritania. The Polisario Front, the Sahrawi independence movement backed by Algeria, rejected the agreement and declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Mauritania withdrew in 1979, and Morocco occupied the entire territory, building a 2,700-kilometer sand wall fortified with landmines to separate Moroccan-controlled areas from Polisario-held territory. The conflict has continued for over four decades, with roughly 170,000 Sahrawi refugees living in camps in southwestern Algeria. The Green March remains one of the most audacious acts of mass political theater in modern history, a bloodless gambit that redrew borders and created a conflict that no one has been able to resolve.