From Western Sahara (1975) to today’s Greece

The Greek academic Konstantínos Grívas, who teaches geopolitics at the National School of Army Officers, writes in an article

“It would be criminally naïve to believe that what is at stake on our border today is only the fact that a few tens of thousands of illegal migrants are arriving in Greece to add to the already existing migrants. This is only the visible tip of the iceberg. In fact, Greece is being attacked by Turkey in a total aggression, which seeks to deconstruct its national identity as a whole. If Greece fails to prevent the fanatical mobs from attacking its borders with the help of the Turkish army and police, then Greek national sovereignty as a whole will be jeopardized.”

“While this may seem excessive to some people, they need to know that this has already happened in modern history. In particular, what is happening today on the Greek-Turkish border bears a dangerous resemblance to the “Marcha Verde” implemented by King Hassan II of Morocco in 1975 to conquer the Spanish Sahara. In more detail, these were the last days of Spanish domination in his colony in North Africa. The Polisario Liberation Front led a guerrilla war against the Spanish and it became likely that it would soon gain independence.”

“However, Hassan II wanted to incorporate Spanish Sahara into his territory. So he had to act. And he had to act quickly before the departure of the Spaniards because he would later go and attack an independent country, while under Spanish rule he would make his communication by selling the case as the liberator of Moroccan territories under Spanish colonial rule. But the strategic balance of forces with Spain did not allow him to take conventional military action, so he chose an asymmetrical method, we would say today.”

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“Specifically, he gathered some 350,000 so-called civilians, who, on 6 November 1975, advanced allegedly peacefully because unarmed in the Spanish Sahara, accompanied by some 20,000 soldiers, overthrew the Spanish military forces that had been ordered not to fire them. As a result, Morocco was able to achieve its objectives and in the so-called Madrid agreements of 14 November 1975 to share Spanish Sahara with Mauritania”.

“Then, of course, the Polisario Front launched a painful and ferocious guerrilla struggle to liberate his country from the two invaders. It succeeded in expelling Mauritania but Morocco occupied the territories that the Mauritanians had evacuated. For decades, the war raged and the Moroccans had built a huge wall 2,000 km long to block the Polisario. Even today, the question of national independence of Western Sahara has not been definitively resolved.”

“So we see that the so-called civilians, who in large numbers crossed the border in this way and then actually occupied a whole country, in the not so distant past. This same tactic seems to be adopted by Erdogan’s Turkey today. In other words, he is instrumentalizing masses of apparent civilians, under the supervision of Turkish state forces, in order to neutralize Greek national sovereignty in Thrace, with all the consequences that this may have in the future”,

“In other words, we have to understand that Greece is undergoing a major attack. We don’t have to deal with a so-called refugee crisis, nor with the supposed management of migration flows, let alone with everything that the usual parrots still think they are repeating through the media. We are under attack from Turkey, and it is an asymmetric and hybrid attack, but a total attack. It is clear-cut. And we are on our last line of defense. If we fall into the trap into which the Spaniards have fallen, our national sovereignty will be violated. There is no room for hesitation, there is no room for erroneous readings of reality”, Konstantínos Grívas, 2 March 2020.