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.
Stevis’ reporting has not made him popular. “I am trying to say things as they are, although it is difficult to do so in a small place where everyone knows each other by their first name. I have lost friends and I have made many enemies.”
