Green March

Green March
Marches of 7 November (in green) and military action of 31 October (in red)
Date 6 November 1975 Location Spanish Sahara Result Madrid Agreements Territorial changes Spain leaves the territory and Morocco and Mauritania partially occupy it
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
5000 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 to Morocco the disputed, autonomous semi-metropolitan province of Spanish Sahara. 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 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.