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The 50th anniversary of the Glorious Green March falls on Moroccan citizens this year with a distinctly different flavor. As Morocco commemorates half a century since this watershed moment in its territorial integrity quest, the United Nations Security Council has delivered what many consider the decisive turning point in the Western Sahara dispute.
The October 31 adoption of Resolution 2797 has dramatically shifted the international approach to the decades-long conflict, explicitly endorsing Morocco’s autonomy proposal as the basis for a permanent solution.
Surprisingly, this resolution came on Halloween – one cannot help but draw the parallel to a political horror show for Algeria and its fabricated Polisario Front, whose hollow ideological foundation now faces international rejection.
For Algeria, it is as if a curtain has finally been pulled back, revealing a stage that was always empty. Resolution 2797 is not simply a diplomatic defeat for the Algerian establishment; it is the unraveling of a national myth.
Half a century of political theater, arms financing, intelligence operations, and ideological propaganda has yielded nothing but depleted coffers, international estrangement, and an impoverished foreign policy sustained by resentment rather than vision, and – most importantly – wasted resources that could have benefited the Algerian people.
True, the discussion today must center on the road ahead rather than dwell on what is gone – “lli fat mat” (“what is past has died”), as the Moroccan saying goes. But history never vanishes; it remains like the foundation of a house – unseen, yet it carries every wall we stand on. In that sense, history is never “dead”; it is the architecture of the present, the groundwork upon which every political horizon is built.
Masterfully orchestrated by the late King Hassan II on November 6, 1975, the Green March remains one of the most significant events in Morocco’s contemporary history. This peaceful epic mobilized 350,000 Moroccan volunteers who, armed only with the Holy Quran and prayers on their lips, crossed into the southern provinces to reclaim territories under Spanish colonization.
The march itself followed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion delivered on October 16, 1975, which confirmed the existence of legal ties of allegiance (bay‘a) between the Sultans of Morocco and the Sahrawi tribes. On the same day, King Hassan II announced the Green March in his famous Marrakech national address.
What began as a bold liberation movement has evolved over five decades into a comprehensive development strategy under King Mohammed VI’s vision. Today, the southern provinces stand as living testimony to a profound transformation, positioning themselves as strategic economic hubs with vast investments and global connectivity toward Africa, the Atlantic, and beyond.
The unity existed before the cut
The historical context behind this territorial dispute reveals the systematic dismemberment Morocco suffered during the colonial era. Before colonization, Morocco constituted the economic and commercial heart of the entire Western Sahara.
As historian Bernard Lugan notes, Morocco was the driving commercial force throughout the western Saharan region, extending its influence beyond Tagant while controlling the desert routes and major urban and caravan centers. The longitudinal axis starting from Agadir-Sijilmassa-Touat and crossing Western Sahara to reach the Senegal and Niger river valleys was under Moroccan control.
Through dynasties spanning centuries – from the Almoravids who created “Greater Morocco” in the 11th century to the Alaouites who have ruled since the 17th century – Morocco’s sovereignty over the Saharan territories remained consistently affirmed.
Historical records document continuous manifestations of this sovereignty, including military control of the coastline extending to Cape Blanc under Moulay al Rashid (1664-1672), and Sultan Moulay Hassan I’s direct oversight of the region in the late 19th century.
The artificiality of the Western Sahara dispute becomes even more evident when examining the colonial fracturing of North African borders. Unlike many other colonial projects, Morocco’s amputation was not imposed by a single authority but rather carved up by overlapping European imperialist formations. Spain claimed Western Sahara, the Rif, and northern enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla (still under Madrid’s control today), while France dominated the remainder.
This multi-power intervention complicated Morocco’s territorial cohesion far more than in territories controlled by a single colonial administrator. The Eastern Sahara regions were similarly fragmented, resulting in geographic lacerations across historically unified lands, including Tindouf, Touat, and Béchar, which France detached from Morocco and attached to “Algeria” under the assumption that Algeria would remain French indefinitely.
The layered protectorates and segmented spheres of control meant that the question of territorial restoration did not conclude with formal independence. The struggle persisted long after Morocco’s independence. The kingdom recovered the Tarfaya region in 1958 and Sidi Ifni in 1969.
Even the Green March of 1975 only returned Saguia el-Hamra and the northern part of the Sahara to Moroccan sovereignty, while the Oued Eddahab region was later recovered in 1979.
The Spanish colonizers stubbornly refused to relinquish the Sahara territories. But this changed with the Green March, fundamentally altering regional power dynamics in Morocco’s favor at a time when coordination was building between the Algerian state and Franco’s Spain to create a puppet entity with the Polisario as its political front.
The summer of 1975 saw the preparation of an Algerian-Spanish scheme to declare Saharan independence using the Polisario as a façade while dividing military and economic benefits between Algeria and Spain.
Documents from the United Nations mission that visited the region in May/June 1975 reveal the transformation in Spain’s position between the delegation’s visits to Madrid on May 8 and 20. Spain’s intent was to establish a “cooperative agreement” with Algeria through the Polisario while ensuring continued access to the region’s resources.
By May 23, Madrid itself formally notified the UN of its decision to withdraw from the Sahara, declaring that its presence had ended and that authority would be transferred without leaving a power vacuum – an acknowledgment that the colonial chapter had reached its natural terminus.
The Moroccan monarch’s strategic genius in announcing the Green March following the ICJ advisory opinion disrupted these machinations entirely. While Spain rushed to the Security Council, claiming Morocco threatened peace, the Council issued three recommendations between the March announcement and its commencement.
Rather than supporting Spain’s demands, the Council merely called for negotiations under Article 33 of the UN Charter, effectively legitimizing Morocco’s position.
In this context, King Hassan II articulated the spirit of the Green March in his historic address from Agadir on November 5, 1975. The monarch laid the groundwork for a peaceful reclamation, urging would-be marchers to avoid confrontation and be friendly toward both Spanish officials and settlers, as well as avoid or ignore provocation from non-Spanish armed elements who would be seeking to provoke confrontation.
“If you encounter a Spaniard, whether soldier or civilian, greet him, embrace him, share with him your food and water. We hold no hatred and no animosity. Had we wished for war, we would have sent an army, not unarmed citizens. Our aim is not to shed blood, but to advance guided by God’s blessing in a peaceful march,” he instructed the marchers.
“And if aggression comes from others, not the Spaniards, know that your valiant army stands ready to protect you from any harm.”
The Green March embodied Moroccan identity – an authenticity rooted in Islamic values, resistance to colonialism, and faith in justice. When King Hassan II proclaimed the march, Moroccans enthusiastically registered as volunteers, embodying the unbreakable bond between throne and people.
This national unity created an insurmountable force that compelled Spain to negotiate its exit, leading to the Madrid Accords of November 14, 1975, through which Madrid formally recognized the transfer of administrative authority of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania.
Chants cannot substitute for ancestral soil
For fifty years, Algeria has instrumentalized the Western Sahara dispute as a tool of strategic obstruction. Even as it unrelentingly used the conflict to contain Morocco’s ascent while presenting itself as a self-styled “revolutionary vanguard” of the region, Algeria still claimed to be a mere observer to the conflict. The regime’s fixation is not merely the residue of the 1963 Sand War – which Algeria decisively lost – but a long-term doctrine of antagonism.
More fundamentally, it reflects how the conflict serves Algiers’s internal political architecture: without a permanent external enemy, the military regime’s legitimacy would be laid bare, naked before its own citizens. The Sahara, therefore, operates less as a foreign policy priority and more as a sustaining myth that justifies centralized militarized rule, suppresses dissent, and diverts attention from profound economic and governance failures.
Inside Algeria, both Mouradia (the presidential palace) and the kabranat (the military establishment) fear that resolving the Western Sahara issue would remove the last pretext shielding the regime from its own contradictions.
They worry that, once the southern question is settled, Morocco might naturally turn its diplomatic attention toward the Eastern Sahara – territories historically tied to Moroccan sovereignty before French colonial re-mapping. In stonewalling Morocco’s recovery of its southern provinces while preempting what may be in line for the Eastern Sahara, Algeria has long presented the kingdom as inherently “expansionist.” Yet such labels are brittle, breaking under even minimal historical scrutiny. Algerians themselves know that rhetoric cannot erase archival fact. And the fact is that historical documents, treaties, and bay‘a records do exist.
With the UN having decisively embraced Morocco’s stance with its latest resolution on the Sahara dispute, Algeria must now be painfully waking up to the fact that the long arc of history does not bend to slogans. Indeed, what makes Algeria’s position even more untenable is that the country’s entire stance relies on fabricated claims and manufactured grievances. While Algeria publicly demanded a referendum for the Sahrawis, its president, Boumediene, explicitly told Arab leaders at the Rabat Summit in October 1974 that “the problem now concerns Morocco and Mauritania.” He even declared that if Morocco and Mauritania reached an agreement on dividing the Saharan territory, “I will be among those who applaud this agreement.”
The Polisario Front itself, when subjected to careful historical examination, underscores the contrived character of Algeria’s narrative. Far from representing the Sahrawi people, many of those placed under the Polisario’s banner were Moroccans taken hostage, alongside others brought in from neighboring countries with no historical connection to the Sahara.
Created as a leftist-socialist entity in the 1970s, the separatist group found backing from regimes hostile to the monarchy, particularly in an Arab world that viewed monarchical systems as backward.
The Polisario leaders – from El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed to Mohamed Abdelaziz and Ibrahim Ghali – were themselves Moroccans educated in Moroccan universities, many of them sons of former members of the Moroccan Liberation Army, whose initial aim was to fight Spanish colonial forces in the Sahara.
Their families continued to live in Moroccan cities, and their struggle was originally framed as part of Morocco’s broader anti-colonial liberation movement. It was only once Libyan funding under Muammar Gaddafi and Algerian military shelter under Houari Boumédiène entered the equation that the movement was re-engineered into a separatist project, turning their arms not against the colonizer, but against Morocco itself.
Their imitationist, ersatz revolutionary posturing relied on hackneyed socialist slogans, empty liberation rhetoric, and anti-monarchist ideological constructs divorced from historical reality. The doctrinal bankruptcy of their pseudo-Marxist dogma became evident as global socialism collapsed, leaving them as ideologically taxidermied orphans clinging to obsolete revolutionary jargon while serving as geopolitical pawns in Algeria’s regional chess game.
The cynical hypocrisy was most visible in 2021, when Ibrahim Ghali entered Spain secretly under the false identity of “Mohamed Benbattouch” with Algerian nationality. The episode exposed, at the time, the extent of covert coordination between Algiers and Madrid – arrangements rooted in Spain’s historical sensitivities surrounding the Sahara question.
Yet this maneuver proved short-lived, calling to mind the similarly fleeting 1975 attempt. By March 2022, Spain openly reversed course and declared the autonomy initiative “the most serious, credible, and realistic basis” for resolving the dispute.
In other words, Spain learned that aligning with the schemes of Mouradia comes at diplomatic cost, and that strategic clarity ultimately lies in supporting stability rather than participating in clandestine gambits that collapse when exposed to daylight.
Diplomacy, not slogans, now writes the future
Fast-forward to 2025, and the international landscape has dramatically shifted. Resolution 2797, adopted by the Security Council on October 31, marks an unprecedented diplomatic victory for Morocco. For the first time, a UN Security Council resolution explicitly positions Morocco’s 2007 Autonomy Plan as the basis for negotiations, describing it as the pathway to a “just, lasting, and mutually acceptable political solution” consistent with the UN Charter.
The resolution passed with eleven votes in favor, three abstentions (China, Pakistan, and Russia), and no votes against. Significantly, in a telling admission of diplomatic defeat, Algeria refused to participate in the vote.
By explicitly acknowledging that “genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty could represent a most feasible solution,” the Security Council has effectively enshrined the position Morocco has defended since 2007 as the only realistic framework for settlement.
This paradigm shift in international law represents a transition from the traditional concept where self-determination was equated exclusively with independence toward an emerging model that understands self-determination as participation within sovereignty. It also expresses a clear break with the open-ended framework that Algeria exploited to prolong the conflict indefinitely – closing the political space that once enabled perpetual delay.
The resolution’s language transforms the Council’s authority from implementing a hypothetical plebiscite to guaranteeing the integrity of a political process, with the principle of “pacta sunt servanda” (agreements must be kept) now governing the path forward.
The legal significance cannot be overstated: the Council treats Morocco’s autonomy proposal as a lawful modality of self-determination that reconciles peoples’ aspirations with state sovereignty. Unlike earlier resolutions establishing MINURSO in the 1990s, Resolution 2797 contains no mention of a referendum – another severe blow to the Polisario’s fundamental position. Instead, it emphasizes negotiation, compromise, and mutual acceptability.
This diplomatic revolution reflects the culmination of Morocco’s patient, strategic vision under King Mohammed VI, who launched the Autonomy Initiative in 2007 and has systematically built international support for this pragmatic solution.
In fact, since around 2016 – particularly after its return to the African Union in 2017 – Morocco adopted an accelerated and unapologetically forward diplomacy that did not even leave Algeria the time or the space to grasp the pace of the shift. Within only a few years, Rabat moved from having only a few scattered supporters to securing nearly 30 consulates in Laayoune and Dakhla, beginning with the Comoros in December 2019.
More importantly, it transformed the Autonomy Plan from a proposal into the organizing reference of the international conversation. Close to 120 countries endorse this Moroccan proposal not merely as a “solution,” but as the structuring horizon for any credible pathway to a final settlement. What began as the position of a small core of states has, within a remarkably short span, expanded into the stance of nearly two-thirds of UN member countries.
The growing recognition of Morocco’s position by major world powers – including the United States, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom – demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach.
The question is now how, not whether
This international U-turn now shifts the discussion from external diplomacy to internal implementation, raising practical questions within Morocco’s legal and governance framework.
The upcoming phase will require continued engagement from all parties, but with a crucial difference: the endpoint is now clearly defined. The terms of engagement have fundamentally shifted from debating whether the territory belongs to Morocco to determining precisely how autonomy will function within Moroccan sovereignty.
The existing 2011 Constitution, which established advanced regionalization as Morocco’s territorial organization model, must now potentially adapt to accommodate the specifics of autonomy implementation in the southern provinces.
Constitutional experts debate whether the current framework suffices or whether constitutional amendments will be necessary. They note that any constitutional changes depend entirely on the outcome of ongoing negotiations under UN auspices.
If these produce a final formula with international and national consensus, limited constitutional amendments might become necessary to ensure harmony between Morocco’s domestic legal system and new commitments.
The current Constitution dedicates its ninth chapter to regionalization but makes no explicit mention of autonomy. This raises legitimate questions about potential incompatibilities between the existing constitutional architecture based on advanced regionalization and the implementation of an autonomy regime with broader self-governing powers.
For instance, Article 7 prohibits founding political parties on a regional basis, potentially conflicting with regional political representation under an autonomy arrangement.
As such, constitutional revision appears inevitable. Other observers say that the 2011 Constitution’s Chapter 13 only prohibits revisions affecting the Islamic religion, the monarchical system, democratic choice, or fundamental rights and freedoms. Since regional autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty falls outside these restrictions, constitutional amendments remain entirely permissible.
Development is the argument; reality is the evidence
The ultimate resolution of Western Sahara represents more than territorial completion; it embodies Morocco’s developmental vision versus the paralysis in Algeria’s Tindouf camps that deny generations basic opportunities for advancement.
Morocco has reconfigured its southern provinces into active corridors of integration – building ports, highways, renewable energy complexes, universities, industrial platforms, and logistical gateways linking the Maghreb to the Sahel. By contrast, the Polisario-controlled camps in southwestern Algeria stand as suspended landscapes of stagnation.
As they endlessly reel from epidemics of malnutrition, a host of undernourishment-related diseases, and the Polisario leadership’s chronic mismanagement of humanitarian aid, the camps have become archives of a failed ideological experiment. Tindouf, to put it bluntly, is now a space where time has been deliberately arrested to preserve a manufactured identity that cannot withstand the world beyond the sandbanks.
The Polisario-run camps are not communities so much as political exhibits – reminders of a conflict that survives only through the insistence of those who require perpetual exile to justify their own authority.
King Mohammed VI’s development model for the southern provinces, launched in Laayoune in 2015 with an initial budget of MAD 77 billion (later increased), includes transformative projects like the Dakhla Atlantic port, the Tiznit-Dakhla expressway, water desalination plants, industrial zones, and solar and wind energy production units.
This economic dynamism contrasts sharply with the desolation of the Tindouf camps, where generations remain hostage to a political fiction.
Moreover, the Royal Atlantic Initiative aims to facilitate Sahel countries’ access to the Atlantic Ocean and establish the Atlantic façade as an economic integration hub connecting Africa to Europe and the Americas. This forward-looking vision aligns perfectly with Morocco’s broader African strategy, promoting South-South cooperation and regional integration.
Resolution 2797 acknowledges not only historical and legal realities but also developmental achievements – marking, in effect, the beginning of the final chapter in the Western Sahara saga.
What remains most poignant in this chapter is that the sons and daughters of Tindouf are not “returning” as newcomers. They are simply tracing their way back to the first horizon that named them – to the land that knows their footsteps before their footsteps know the land.
In his October 31 address – now decreed a national holiday known as Unity Day – the King extended a direct and sincere call to the residents of the Tindouf camps. He urged them to seize what he described as a historic opportunity to return to their families and participate in shaping their local institutions under the Autonomy Initiative.
All returnees would be welcomed as full citizens with complete equality, the monarch reaffirmed, stressing: “As King, guarantor of citizens’ rights and freedoms, I solemnly affirm that all Moroccans are equal, with no difference between those returning from Tindouf camps and their brothers residing in the national territory.”
In the same spirit of reconciliation, the King also renewed his invitation to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune for a frank, direct, and fraternal dialogue, aimed at rebuilding trust and revitalizing the Maghreb Union. Morocco has consistently rejected any foreign mediation, maintaining that the issue is not between Rabat and a proxy, but between two neighboring states sharing borders, history, and responsibility.
The door remains open – yet Algeria continues to delay, adopt evasive postures, and avoid sitting at the negotiation table, even as regional realities shift unmistakably toward Morocco’s position.
The UN’s endorsement of Morocco’s autonomy proposal represents a victory of pragmatism over ideology, development over stagnation, and integration over separation. It recognizes that Morocco’s approach offers the only viable path to sustainable peace and prosperity for the region’s inhabitants. And it is only fitting that, after five decades of meandering through short-lived escalations on the military front and a series of diplomatic highs and lows, the owl of the Moroccan Sahara is finally coming home to roost.
Source: Morocco word news
