Journalists have been barred from entering the complex after violence flared last weekend following the rape of a young Syrian woman.
 
But one senior Greek official was so angry with the terrifying daily chaos he has to deal with, that he asked to speak to me in private.
 
He produced figures for new arrivals to the camp since the deportations began, and told me that, for every migrant deported, at least three new arrivals were admitted after landing on beaches.
 
‘We sent 64 out by boat back to Turkey this week,’ he told me. ‘Since then, we have had 152 new people coming in.
 
'The week before, we had 300 new arrivals. The numbers don’t add up. This whole exercise is a lot of garbage.’
 
The latest official figures show 1,758 migrants — men, women and children — arrived in Greece between March 31 and April 6.
 
On Thursday, as the tourist season approached, the authorities gave the thousands of migrants and refugees camped out at Piraeus, Greece’s largest port, two weeks to move to army-built camps voluntarily or be expelled.
According to the Greek government, there are still more than 4,600 people in the makeshift camp.
That night in Chios, there were angry clashes as local Greeks confronted refugees living at the camp at the island’s port, throwing fireworks and bottles.
 
The same island official told me that fewer than 50 per cent of the migrants housed at his camp are from Syria or fleeing war. The majority are from countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Afghanistan and from sub-Saharan Africa .
 
‘It’s all a big game,’ explained the official. ‘The prize is getting asylum in Europe. They think they will be given cars and houses and plenty of money. I feel sorry for the genuine ones with little children. But they are in the minority.’
 
Back at the unofficial camp by the harbour, where migrants had been holding up babies for the TV cameras and put up signs berating Europe for the deportations, I spoke to a number of people who were clearly trying to manipulate the system.
 
Somalis Abdi, 18, and Kani, 19, bought air tickets from their homeland to Istanbul. They, too, took a bus to Izmir before paying £400 each to travel by inflatable to Chios.
Both already had relatives who had made it to England: Abdi’s mother had left Somalia many years earlier and now lives in Wimbledon, while Kani’s uncle is in Birmingham.
 
Both had also previously flown from Somalia to Kenya and Uganda, where they had applied for asylum at the British embassies but been turned down. Their relatives could not support them — having been claiming benefits since arriving in UK — hence the refusal.
 
Now, after two years back in Somalia, they were trying again. They asked me for advice on how to convince EU officials in Greece that their cases are genuine.
 
‘Should we say we were threatened by Al-Shabaab [the terror group operating in East Africa]?’ asked Abdi. ‘What is the best story to tell?’ Yesterday, the unofficial camp where Abdi had put his questions to me was cleared by police overnight after clashes between refugees and locals erupted when one migrant tried to remove the Greek flag flying over the camp.
 
The migrants have been taken to centres elsewhere on the island, where they will await processing — and possible deportation.
 
The people of Chios — known as the Island of Tears on account of the drops of resin that are harvested from trees — were initially sympathetic to the migrants.
 
No longer. One elderly woman told me how she took food to migrants — only for it to be rejected for being ‘non-Arabic’, while she was harassed for wearing a Greek Orthodox cross around her neck.
 
‘I felt very sorry for them,’ she told me. ‘But I don’t any more. They are very angry and seem to think they are owed something by all of us here.’
 
Locals are furious about the mess and crime — and terrified by a catastrophic 85 per cent drop in tourist bookings.
 
So what is the answer? Many on Chios think that migrants who define themselves by their religion — Islam — should be resettled in Muslim states such as Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
 
But few migrants find this acceptable. ‘I want to go to Europe,’ said Mohammed, 19, who fled Syria a year ago and had been working in Turkey before coming to Chios this week. ‘I have friends there and I want to be with them.’
 
For those few being repatriated to Turkey this week, and for those who will be in the weeks to come, the chance of getting to their promised land has just become more difficult.
 
But my time in Turkey and on Chios suggests that will not stop them from trying — along with millions still determined to get to Europe and pay no heed to the EU’s £4 billion scheme to send them back.
 
Source

 
THE BEAUTIFUL ISLAND OF CHIOS
 - IN BETTER TIMES