Cooperstown Resident Publishes History of Greek Migrant Crisis

By WRILEY NELSON
COOPERSTOWN

In the last months of 2014, a backwater fishing village on the Greek island of Lesvos became the epicenter of the global refugee crisis. Molyvos, an increasingly popular tourist destination that sits just across the four mile-wide Straits of Mytilene from Turkey, suddenly became the entryway to the European Union for thousands of refugees. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about 450,000 displaced people descended on the village of fewer than 1,000 permanent residents between November 2014 and March 2016. Greek, EU and international authorities failed to take any action for nearly 10 months, leaving a small group of local volunteers as the only source of help for tens of thousands of desperate, sick, injured and malnourished people. The crisis did not even receive much media attention, and no full account of the volunteer efforts has yet been published. That will change at the beginning of October, when John Webb, a close friend of the volunteer leaders and a Cooperstown resident, publishes “Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis.” The book is based on years of research and extensive interviews with many of the local volunteers.

Melinda McRostie and her husband, Theo Kosmetos, chef-owners of a small beach restaurant, began handing out hot tea, sandwiches and warm clothing to the traumatized refugees literally washing up outside their door in November 2014. The trickle of people soon turned into a human flood, and McRostie and Kosmetos began coordinating larger relief and rescue efforts with other locals. Another couple from a few miles up the beach, Eric and Philippa Kempson, began assisting with raft landings and providing food and first aid. For eight months, these two couples and a handful of other concerned locals organized an industrial-scale rescue and relief effort with no help from national or international agencies.

“This was a period of time when the village of Molyvos, smaller than Cooperstown, received almost half a million refugees,” Webb said. “There was nobody there; efforts to attract international media attention were met with responses such as ‘there are more important things going on in the world than this.’ That was at a time when that village had already received almost 300,000 people with absolutely no support.”

“The refugees were also victims of smugglers; they were paying anywhere from $1,800.00 to $4,000.00 for passage in plastic dinghies that smugglers had crudely made by gluing pieces of scrap plastic together,” Webb continued. “Most of the people came from countries with no major bodies of water and could not swim; the boats were built for 30-40 people and usually had 75-100 on board. They came across in pitiful shape: Hundreds and hundreds died from the boats capsizing in storms or being throw against rocks.”

“Greece at the time was in terrible financial shape, and the average Greek citizen was in desperate shape concerning housing, food, medical care, and so on,” Webb said. “There was great resentment against the rest of the EU. Greece could not address this problem, and the EU refused to address it. Because they weren’t there, the Red Cross wasn’t there, the U.N. wasn’t there, no non-governmental organizations were there. They were alone.”

Help from international sources did not arrive until September 2015, nearly a year after the crisis began, when worldwide news networks began broadcasting a photo of a drowned Syrian boy whose body washed up on a Turkish beach.

“NGOs began to apply for admission to Greece, and with them came large numbers of volunteers, most bringing sincere devotion, high energy, good will, and important skills,” a release by Webb’s publisher said. “Among them, however, were also traffickers in children and still others with social, political, and religious agendas that actually interfered with the relief effort. The involvement of well-known, internationally recognized NGOs, while welcomed and needed, ended up provoking a crisis of confidence and good will when their efforts turned out to be void of respectful cooperation with the locals who had worked so intensely alone during the long months when there was no outside help.”

Webb himself has extensive experience working with refugees. He helped develop teaching and institutional practices for schools working with immigrant and refugee populations while teaching at Hunter College. During nearly two decades in Spring Valley, New York, he helped lead and coordinate school district and community responses to an influx of Haitian refugees, working as a foreign language and English instructor and a liaison with cultural and social organizations.

The book concludes with a reflective epilogue in which Webb contemplates the motivations of the volunteers and their local and international supporters and detractors. Each of the 10 people he interviewed were heavily criticized by neighbors and peers, several had to seek treatment for severe post-traumatic stress disorder from the things they saw, and each one admitted that their lives had been permanently changed. Nevertheless, they all affirmed that they would do it again if the need arose. War, the climate crisis, and political-economic disquiet will continue to exacerbate one another and displace more and more people as the troubled young 21st century wears on. Societies around the world are tottering under the relentless onslaught of geopolitical crisis, extreme weather, disorienting technological advances and an increasingly financialized, erratic and inequitable global economy. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there were nearly 109 million refugees worldwide as of December 2022; one of every 80 human beings alive has been forcibly displaced from their home as a result of persecution, conflict or human rights violations. At the same time, the exponential growth of the refugee population in the last two decades has caused a nativist, often openly racist, backlash in many refugee-receiving countries, especially in Central and Western Europe. The refugee problem is the great question of the century. The people of Molyvos may not point the way to a systemic solution, but they provide an example of the best human qualities in the face of an intractable challenge. It is a challenge that—in one way or another—every community on earth will face in the coming decades. As Webb concluded in promotional materials for the book:
“Yet, there in the middle of it all, in a place and time, Molyvos, 2015, a small group of people responded to what appeared to be their basic human instincts and stepped forward to do what they could to help. In spite of the chaos and the extreme personal hardship and sacrifice, they succeeded in providing relief to people in the direst of circumstances, and their village and its way of life ended up remaining intact rather than disintegrating under the weight of the massive refugee crisis. Whether or not they are heroes, their story is worthy of being told, because there might be lessons to be learned about what humanity needs to do to survive and to learn to live together.”

“Molyvos: A Greek Village’s Heroic Response to the Global Refugee Crisis” will be released by Potomac Books and the University of Nebraska Press on Sunday, October 1. It can be pre-ordered or purchased wherever books are sold. Webb will present an author talk at the Village Library of Cooperstown at 3 p.m. on Sunday, October 22.