6 November 1975: 350,000 unarmed Moroccans marched into the Spanish Sahara.
The Green March was the peaceful mass march by which Morocco reclaimed the Spanish Sahara. On 6 November 1975, some 350,000 unarmed volunteers carrying Qurans and green banners crossed into the colony; within days Spain agreed to withdraw, and the Madrid Accords of 14 November ended ninety years of Spanish rule.
The march was King Hassan II's answer to the International Court of Justice, which had ruled on 16 October 1975 that the territory's people held ties of allegiance to the Moroccan throne — but not sovereignty — and should decide their own future. Rather than wait for a referendum Spain was stalling, Hassan called the nation to walk. Volunteers poured in from every province — farmers, workers, civil servants, men and women — and gathered at Tarfaya on the border.
The marchers carried the Moroccan flag, green banners of Islam, portraits of the King, and the Quran: a deliberate pageant of peaceful intent, about a tenth of them women. Spanish troops, under orders not to fire on unarmed civilians — and with Franco dying in Madrid — watched them advance some ten kilometers into the territory. No shot was fired.
Eight days after the march began, Spain signed the Madrid Accords with Morocco and Mauritania, agreeing to withdraw and transfer administration of the territory. The partition that followed gave the northern two-thirds to Morocco and the south to Mauritania; when Mauritania renounced its claim in 1979, Morocco took the whole. The Green March is commemorated every 6 November as a national anniversary.
No modern state had ever reclaimed territory with an army of civilians. The Green March remains the defining act of Hassan II's reign and of Morocco's southern provinces: peaceful, popular, and — in Moroccan eyes — the closing chapter of the decolonization that began with independence in 1956.
