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Green March
| Green March | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of Western Sahara conflict | |||||||||
 Marches of 7 November (in green) and military action of 31 October (in red) | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Spain |
 Morocco | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
|
Prince Juan Carlos Carlos Arias Navarro |
Hassan II Ahmed Osman | ||||||||
| Units involved | |||||||||
|
Units of Tropas Nómadas Light cavalry groups of the Third and Fourth Thirds of the Legion Expeditionary battalion of the Canary Infantry Regiment 50 | Royal Armed Forces | ||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
| 5,000 legionaries |
350,000 civilians 25,000 soldiers | ||||||||
The Green March was a strategic mass demonstration in November 1975, coordinated by the Moroccan government and 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 some 350,000 Moroccans advanced several kilometers into the Western Sahara territory. Morocco later gained control of most of the former Spanish Sahara, which it continues to hold.
The Green March was condemned by the international community, notably in the 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.[1]
Morocco gained control of most of the former Spanish Sahara, which it still holds to this day. The refusal of the Saharawi people to submit to the Moroccan monarchy gave rise to the Western Sahara conflict, still unresolved today, and whose main episode was the Western Sahara War.
- ^ Bereketeab, R. (2014). Self-Determination and Secession in Africa: The Post-Colonial State. Routledge Studies in African Development. Taylor & Francis. p. 260. ISBN 978-1-317-64969-4. Retrieved 2 March 2022.
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