MADRID, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Spain's parliament rejected on Wednesday a proposal to debate whether its army launched chemical weapon attacks in Morocco in the 1920s which one politician described as "the African Guernica".

The Esquerra Republicana party proposed a motion calling on Spain to recognise the attacks and pay compensation for damages during a colonial war for control of the Rif mountains that loom over the Strait of Gibraltar.

A parliamentary body briefly discussed the motion but decided not to send it to the main floor.

"The simple fact that it has been discussed in parliament for the first time is already a victory," Joan Tarda, a member of Esquerra Republicana, told Reuters.

He said the party would now aim to attach the motion as an amendment to law already being discussed in parliament.

According to Spanish, Moroccan and British historians, Spanish planes dropped phosgene, chloropicrin and mustard gas on troops, towns and villages in the Rif from 1923, often choosing market days so that more people were killed.

Tarda likened the attacks to the aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish civil war, by German forces backing General Francisco Franco's right-wing troops.

The attacks in Morocco were widely perceived as vengeance for the battle of Anual in 1921, in which Rif warriors armed with little more than flintlock rifles inflicted a heavy defeat on a modern Spanish army of 26,000 men, killing half of them.

Morocco says 80 percent of its larynx cancer cases are found in people from the Rif, and are thought to be linked to chemical attacks.

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