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(ANSAmed) - MADRID, NOVEMBER 24 - In the fourth century after the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, a motion presented by the socialists in the Spanish parliament asks the government to end a historic injustice, and to take the necessary steps to recognise and strengthen economic, social and cultural ties with the communities in North and Sub-Saharan Africa that house the descendants of the Moriscos that were expelled in the XVII century. We must grant "institutional recognition and a compensation to the descendants of the Moriscos", said sources of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) to ANSAmed. The initiative was taken by a socialist MP of Granada, José Antonio Perez Tapias. On April 9 1609, king Philip III, on request of the Duke of Lerma, signed the decree which ended the presence in Spain of the Andalusian Muslim minority, which until that time had stayed in Spain under the sovereignty of Christian monarchs. Three hundred thousand people, descendants of the Moors who had lived on Spanish ground for around 900 years, had to leave the peninsula. It was the final act of an expatriation that started in 1492, after the Catholic Kings conquered Granada, with the forced conversions of Moriscos ordered by Cardinal Cisneros. Many decided to leave their cities, but tried to stay in Spain illegally. Most of them moved to North Africa however, to the Rif region and the Maghreb, particularly in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania and Mali. The goal of the socialist initiative is to recognise the injustice that has been done to this group, the motion explains. This injustice, according to Perez Tapias a product of religious intolerance, of the policy of forced conversion or exile, of the resentment of the Christian population and the claim to form a Christian kingdom, without minorities that might shed doubt on its cohesion. There are no records of a census of the heirs of the 300,000 people that were expelled from Spain 400 years ago. The compensation, the socialist group explains, is meant to be symbolic rather than economic. (ANSAmed).