The business of rescue
FORMER BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY DAVID MILIBAND FLEW FROM HIS HOME IN NEW YORK TO THE GREEK CITY OF MYTILENE, ON THE ROCKY EAST COAST OF LESBOS, AN ISLAND IN THE AEGEAN SEA. IT WAS THE FALL OF 2015, AND LESBOS HAD FOR MONTHS BEEN THE PRIMARY LANDING POINT FOR REFUGEES FLEEING WARS IN SYRIA AND IRAQ. Now the steady flow was becoming a deluge—as many as 3,000 refugees a day. Local officials were overwhelmed.
Driving north from the Lesbos airport, Miliband, the president and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), one of the world’s largest humanitarian aid organizations, passed long lines of dazed men and women, many sunburnt and barefoot. These were the newest arrivals, an IRC staffer explained. After making it to shore, they would walk, often for days, to transit sites or government camps where they could apply for political asylum in the European Union.
Miliband stopped to examine a towering heap of life jackets that had been discarded on a beach at the north of the island. In a video he took of himself, which he later uploaded to Twitter, he read aloud from the label on one of the jackets: WILL NOT PROTECT AGAINST DROWNING. NOT FOR BOATING. Miliband, whose Jewish ancestors fled Nazi-occupied Poland in the 1940s, was reminded of the shoes found in concentration camps at the end of the Second World War—objects that came to serve as stand-ins for a different man-made tragedy. The sight “hit me hard, right in the solar plexus,” Miliband recalls today. “Just the scale of it. The agony, the fear, the pain. And so the next step was: How are we going to help these people as quickly and effectively as possible?”
Over the next week, the IRC, which had been working in the region only for a few weeks at this point, implemented a slew of on-the-ground improvements, such as building additional sanitation and shower facilities at the two government-run camps on the island and helping move tons of gravel to a crowded transit site called Kara Tepe, which stood on the side of a rapidly eroding, muddy slope. Staffers rented a fleet of battered minibuses to carry refugees from the beaches, where they arrived, to the camps, where they’d wait—and then from the camps to the ferry terminals, where they’d depart for the mainland.
At the same time, working out of a makeshift war room at his hotel on Lesbos, Miliband and his team gave interviews to media outlets in Europe and the United States, where the IRC is based, in an attempt to apply pressure on governments. He appeared on PBS’s NewsHour, live from the port in Mytilene, to chastise the European Union for failing to adequately address the refugee influx; he told a reporter for The Guardian that “Greece and Italy have been screaming about this problem for over a year. Europe’s eye has been on different things. There
