#stevis

When Ioannis Stevis moved back to his native island of Chios after a long career in journalism he could not have imagined that his retirement project would eventually put him at odds with his own government.

But the local online news service he created, Astraparis, ended up bearing witness to one of the most significant stories in recent European history: the ongoing refugee crisis.

In the past few months his reporting has turned to the boats carrying asylum seekers that have seemingly started vanishing after arriving on Greek shores.

It was the 65-year-old’s coverage of one of these disappearances that sparked controversy. The story was met with official denials and an apparently orchestrated effort to remove his news posts from Facebook, he says.

On 4 May, Stevis reported on the apparent arrival of a group of 14 asylum seekers from the Turkish mainland, about 3.5 miles across the Strait of Chios, on 30 April. There was a picture of their boat and testimony from locals who claimed to have seen the group after they left their landing beach.

Stevis, who used to edit the financial newspaper Kerdos in Athens, called the local police, coastguard and hospital; he contacted the European border agency Frontex, the UN refugee agency and the authorities at the main refugee camp on Chios. All denied any knowledge of an arrival on 30 April.

The official line, Stevis told the Guardian, was that the boat had washed up empty on the island’s shores, “something which contradicted all the testimonies I had gathered from respectable witnesses”.

Astraparis was not the only local outlet to notice the arrivals. Chios Press reported the story but later deleted it. Comments on a Facebook group discussing the refugee sightings were also removed.

The farmers and pensioners wore black clothes and heavy boots, imitating Greece’s special forces, and trod along a rural road on a night patrol looking for migrants trying to cross the northern land border with Turkey. “We’ll get you next time!” they shouted at a small group of men who had made it over and fled.

Two hundred miles to the south, on the border island of Lesbos, locals angrily blocked a dinghy full of migrants from Turkey, including a pregnant woman and children, from getting off on a pier.

On land and at sea, one thing is clear along Greece’s meandering border with Turkey: This is not 2015 anymore. Then, while much of Europe was convulsed with anger and fear as more than a million asylum seekers poured in from distant wars, Greeks helped rescue refugees at sea, or greeted them with empathy as they traversed the country en route to northern Europe.

The citizens of the island of Lesbos were even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Now, the reaction is overt hostility. A new center-right Greek government has temporarily suspended accepting asylum applications and pledged to summarily expel those who come in order to discourage migrants. And ordinary citizens, many of whom who are fed up, are taking matters into their own hands.

Villagers from border towns are forming civilian patrols to round up migrants. Islanders have set up road blocks to stop migrants from reaching refugee camps. Others have physically attacked aid workers and journalists, accusing them of helping migrants come to the island.

For Greeks, the frustration is palpable, and the situation different from five years ago. This time around, Turkey, itself home to more than 3 million Syrian refugees, has opened the gates to thousands of migrants to enter Greece as it tries to pressure Europe for help in the conflict in Syria.

Unlike 2015, this crisis feels far less spontaneous than manufactured, and many Greeks want none of it. The Greek government has responded with a crackdown, shutting the borders, deploying the army and drumming up a wartime rhetoric against Turkey, which it accuses of orchestrating an invasion.

In an apparently coordinated effort by Turkey to raise the pressure on Europe, Turkish state news agencies on Friday showed videos of hundreds of migrants making their way to the Turkish-Greek land border, seemingly facilitated by the Turkish authorities.

The broadcasts, an apparent effort by Turkey to press European leaders into supporting its military campaign in northern Syria, came hours after Turkey suffered heavy losses in fighting in Idlib Province in Syria, prompting an extraordinary NATO ambassadors’ meeting and fears of escalation.

European Union officials, fearful of a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis, were apprehensively watching the developments in Turkey on Friday, as migrants were shown on live television making their way to Turkey’s borders with Greece.

Videos released by Anadolu, Turkey’s state-controlled news wire, showed migrants making their way through fields and roads close to the Turkish-Greek border. A migrant interviewed by a Turkish channel near the border said she had been driven there free by bus.

A Turkish news crew also filmed a boat of migrants as it departed for Greece, in a stunt that implied coordination among smugglers, Turkish officials and the private news media, whose owners are heavily influenced by the government.

Another group that had been driven to the coast turned back after it realized there were no more boats ready to smuggle its members to Greece. But the steady drip of footage at least initially appeared to be coordinated, rather than an organic mass movement of refugees.