Search

In wartime, the support of the civil populations victim of the conflict or to the wounded fighters, was for a long time the job of religious congregations (White fathers, Saint Jean de Malte’s order). They did it to answer religious motivations, according to the principle of the Christian charity. The Red Cross, organization aiming at neutrality, also brings “humanitarian” support to the victims of conflicts. The rise of the social question challenges progressively this charitable and religious model. The Spanish civil war is a decisive stage in the evolution of this help. It is indeed during this conflict that humanitarianism takes a political turn and that the charitable is replaced by ideological support. The action staged by the International Red Help (SRI), created by International Communist (IC) in 1923, in favor of the Spanish republicans, is certainly the best known humanitarian act of the conflict, but it does not have to shadow the solidarity in favor of the Spanish anarchists which was quite important. The Confederación General del Trabajo (CNT) and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) benefited during all the conflict of international help, at first scattered, then organized. It took in the year 1937, the shape of a structured international solidarity organization, Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA). Conceived from the beginning as a humanitarian organization aiming at supporting the Spanish antiauthoritarian movement, SIA is during the conflict a means of spreading anarchist ideas.