International Antifascist Solidarity (SIA)
국제 반파시즘 연대 (SIA)
A humanitarian organisation founded by the anarcho-syndicalist movement during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Aligned with the CNT and FAI, it aided refugees and wounded soldiers and raised funds and publicity for the Republic, spreading anarchist ideas and channelling material support from abroad. Lucía Sánchez Saornil was among its general secretaries.
In depth
The decision to create International Antifascist Solidarity was taken in Valencia on 15 April 1937, but it only began work in June, after the May Days in Barcelona had set anarchists and anti-Stalinist communists against the Republican government and the communists. Conceived as a humanitarian organisation supporting the Spanish libertarian movement and revolution, it allowed the CNT to obtain material support from abroad.
International Antifascist Solidarity worked with Mujeres Libres to aid refugees and wounded soldiers, and Lucía Sánchez Saornil, who helped create it in 1937, served as its general secretary and press and propaganda secretary. French, Swedish, British, Portuguese and North African sections were set up by the end of 1937, and a Belgian section founded in 1946 became a meeting place defending asylum seekers, including exiled CNT members. After the war it subsidised children’s colonies in France, and the physician Amparo Poch y Gascón gave medical help for its Spanish section’s national committee in exile in Toulouse.