How to rethink the Green March?
On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 5, 1975, when King Hassan II gave the signal in the city of Agadir for the launch of the Green March toward the Sahara, he told the marchers, “If you encounter any Spaniards, greet them. If they shoot, continue your march.” This was a masterful piece of rhetoric that reflected a calculated strategy of psychological and diplomatic pressure aimed at avoiding direct confrontation, maintaining the march as a peaceful civil act, and pressuring Spain to negotiate the withdrawal from the Sahara, which was ultimately achieved without bloodshed a few days after the march began.
By instructing the volunteers to greet the Spaniards and avoid confrontation, the King of Morocco sought to project an image of peace and legitimacy, showing that the march was a peaceful claim to sovereignty, not an act of war or a direct military invasion.
Over the past half-century, numerous essays and articles have highlighted the peaceful nature of this remarkable event, emphasizing how, despite its great historical impact, it unfolded without resorting to violence. In addition to this intrinsic characteristic, the Green March possesses, to use the expression of sociologist Louis Qéré, a true “hermeneutic power,” that is, it is not limited to a simple event, but becomes a source of meaning capable of transforming our understanding of history, and beyond its factual development, produces an interpretive rupture that establishes a new perspective.
This hermeneutic power can be seen in the book La Marcha Verde la Epopeya Dios La Patria El Rey (The Green March: The Epic, God, the Fatherland, the King) by political scientist and university professor Mustapha Sehimi,in which the Green March is perceived through various voices as a historical event in the strongest sense of the word, a pragmatic movement of strategic scope, a beacon of national memory, a defining moment for the consciousness of the Moroccan people, a magical moment when all our past merged into our present, a great popular festival of fraternity without hidden aggressive intentions, a structuring dynamic of the country's political life, as well as a brilliant manifestation of national unity and a symbol of communion between the throne and the people. These are different ways of “describing” the Green March, confirming its dynamic and processual nature.
Writing a book about an important event several decades after it took place offers an enriched perspective and significant added value. Indeed, this temporal perspective allows us to approach the event with a critical distance that is difficult to achieve in the immediacy of the events themselves.
On the one hand, the passage of time provides access to a wealth of new sources: declassified archives, testimonies gathered with the benefit of hindsight, in-depth historical analyses and, sometimes, even previously inaccessible documents. This accumulation of information makes it possible to reconstruct the event in a more complete, nuanced and objective manner.
On the other hand, this period offers an opportunity to assess the long-term consequences of the event at the political, social, economic, and cultural levels. The author of this book thus analyzes not only what happened in the mid-1970s, but also how this event influenced the evolution of Moroccan society, its political culture, and its international relations, which allows the Green March to be placed in a historical context, taking into account any historiographical revisions that may have arisen.
In this sense, this beautiful book offers a rich and detailed historical synthesis of the emblematic event of the Green March, which marked the peaceful recovery of the Moroccan Sahara. Mustapha Sehimi, political scientist and informed observer of Moroccan political life, accurately traces the historical origins, political challenges, and popular dimensions of this exceptional national mobilization.
The author does not limit himself to a simple narration of past events, but rather provides an in-depth intellectual work that offers real added value by providing a comprehensive, contextualized analysis that is essential for fully grasping the significance of this event in the modern history of Morocco.
The various contributions in this book, by political actors, historians, political scientists, and journalists, highlight the international context of the time, marked by decolonization and geopolitical rivalries; the strategic vision of the late HM Hassan II, who conceived and orchestrated this peaceful march to assert Morocco's historical rights over its Saharan provinces; the massive popular mobilization, involving civilian volunteers from all regions of the kingdom, driven by a spirit of patriotism and sacrifice, as well as the political and diplomatic consequences of the Green March, in particular its decisive role in the progressive recognition of Morocco's sovereignty over the Sahara.
To rethink the Green March from the historical distance now available, political scientist Abdallah Saaf returns in this book to declassified documentation, particularly the archives of the US State Department relating to the actions of Henry Kissinger, from which he concludes that the Americans did not seem to have seriously opposed the Green March, but were more concerned with preventing a military confrontation in the region.
Although this documentation offers new information about the conditions in which the idea of the Green March emerged in the mind of the Moroccan monarch and what the initial objectives were, Abdallah Saaf points out that many gray areas remain and that the Green March continues to be a promising field for specialized academic research.
In his testimony collected in this book, the former director of Moroccan Radio and Television, Seddik Maaninou, evokes the atmosphere of that historic moment, vividly conveying the intense emotions experienced by journalists, war correspondents, and special envoys from the media covering the events at the time from the city of Tarfaya, where 350,000 marchers gathered in a gigantic camp carefully set up by the Royal Armed Forces and the civil administration. thousand marchers in a gigantic camp carefully set up by the Royal Armed Forces and the civil administration, eagerly awaiting King Hassan II's signal to begin the march towards the Sahara. There, journalists, but also some spies, anxiously awaited the unfolding of events, amid a storm of rumors and whispers that spread rapidly, like a forest fire. reflecting the tension and uncertainty: would the King cancel the March? Would the UN Security Council call for the March to be stopped? Would the King announce the start of the March?
With the idea announced, the strategy in place, and fervent mobilization underway, it was up to the King to decide the right moment to carry out what would become a historic event, unique in its kind and philosophy. Finally, on that afternoon, the King declared, “Tomorrow, God willing, they will cross the border.”
The next day, Thursday, November 6, 1975, the volunteers of the Green March crossed the border that arbitrarily separates Morocco from its Saharan provinces. There is commotion throughout the world.
The Moroccans dared to take up the challenge! They advanced peacefully toward the border with no weapons other than the Koran and the Moroccan flag. This operation, planned by King Hassan II in the utmost secrecy, would alter the balance of power inherited from an unfinished decolonization, twenty years after Morocco's independence.
It was an event, according to Omar El Hadrami, former leader and founder of the Polisario, that reorganized the game by destroying everyone's strategies. On February 28, 1976, a few months after the Green March, the national flag was raised for the first time in El Aaiún, in the heart of the Sahara, marking the end of the occupation of the southern provinces.
This is how the Green March should be understood, as an event that simultaneously represented a break with an outdated past and the founding act of a new reality. The work presented here, distinguished by its great documentary rigor, based on archives, testimonies, and in-depth analysis, invites us to rethink the Green March from a social science perspective, which implies not only analyzing the event in its historical, cultural, and geopolitical dimensions, but also conceptualizing it as a complex, dynamic, and socially constructed phenomenon, as a rupture or a surprise that frustrates predictions.
Within this framework, the eminent historian Abdallah Laroui draws our attention in this book to the fact that the uniqueness of the Green March lay in the enormous gap between the political appeal and the popular response, a response that, overwhelming all tactical considerations, turned skeptical politicians, pragmatic bourgeois, and cynical students into fervent marchers in a matter of days. The Green March thus provoked a “convulsion” that prompted Moroccan society to reinterpret and redefine reality through a collective effort of integration and attribution of meaning.
Living nations that celebrate significant events in their memory often move from memory to history in order to truly appropriate these events, striking a balance between memorial fidelity and historical truth.
Through this book, with its diverse voices, Mustapha Sehimi offers us a masterful reinterpretation of the Green March, perceived as an important historical event that united the Moroccan people in an immense nationalist impulse, but also as a symbol of Hassan II's visionary leadership and the commitment of all of Morocco to other marches for development and peace.
For this reason, it can be said that the most significant merit of this book is that it shows that, while memory is essential to keeping the memory of this historical event alive, cognitive appropriation is necessary to understand it, contextualize it, and fully integrate it into the collective identity of the nation.