Fifty-one years after it set out across the desert, the Green March is still being read as a founding chapter of modern Morocco. A seminar held this week in Tangier brought together local officials, veterans and academics to argue that the peaceful 1975 march and the kingdom’s newest public holiday, Unity Day, are in fact two chapters of the same story.
The event was organized by the Sawani district authority together with the regional branch of the High Commission for Former Resistance Fighters and Liberation Army Veterans, and an association representing retired national security officers. Speakers deliberately paired two dates that now sit close together on Morocco’s national calendar: November 6, commemorating the Green March, and October 31, marked as Unity Day since last year’s royal decision.
Hamida El Jazi told the audience that designating October 31 a national holiday amounted to a symbolic completion of a process that began half a century earlier on the roads leading south. Mustapha Kammour, for his part, described the Green March as the clearest illustration of the bond between the throne and ordinary Moroccans, a case in which grassroots diplomacy effectively paved the way for the state diplomacy that followed.
Much of the discussion also turned to the most recent twist in the Sahara file: the UN Security Council’s adoption of Resolution 2797, which several speakers described as a major step toward a political settlement built around Morocco’s autonomy proposal. Yousra Chennaoui focused on the religious and cultural dimension of national unity, framing it as a heritage she said the monarchy has consistently safeguarded.
The seminar’s closing segment belonged to Younes Cheikh Ali, who heads a Tangier-based foundation dedicated to collective memory. He displayed medals, postage stamps and commemorative coins tied to the 1975 march — artifacts usually kept in private collections that offer a more tactile counterpoint to textbook accounts of the episode.
Similar gatherings have multiplied across Moroccan cities in recent weeks, reflecting an official push to hand younger generations a national narrative in which the Sahara dispute sits front and center, just as Moroccan diplomacy racks up notable wins on the international stage.
