Two years ago, the Greek island of Lesvos was often in the news, as
thousands of refugees arrived on its shores—nearly daily—in small rubber
boats. They came from Turkey, just a few miles away. Some made it, while
others drowned. At the time, Lesvos was essentially a pit stop.
Virtually all of these migrants continued on to the Greek mainland, and
then headed north—following an overland route that took them to Germany
or points beyond. Since then, European nations have pressured Greece to
block the sea route via Lesvos, and other islands, in order to stanch
the flow of refugees. The number of refugees streaming into Lesvos has
diminished, but in the last few months it has started to rise again. In
August, a thousand and fifty-three refugees arrived on the shores of
Lesvos, according to Oxfam. In October, there were twenty-two hundred
and sixty. The island is now a bottleneck in Europe’s unresolved migrant
crisis in which human misery is being contained and forgotten.

In October, I visited Lesvos and saw how the crisis continues to unfold
in plain view on one of the most idyllic islands on Earth. After flying
into Mytilene, the island’s largest town, I drove north into the rolling
hills that abut the city. After twenty minutes, I reached Moria, the
island’s largest refugee camp. Barbed-wire fences surrounded it, as if
it were a prison. The camp’s gates remained open, but some residents
complained that they were harassed by the local police if they ventured
outside. Moria currently holds more than six thousand migrants—triple
its capacity, according to the Greek government.

Outside the gates of Moria, I met a young man from Syria, in his
twenties, named Abed. He was handsome, with a shock of jet-black hair and
jade-green eyes. Abed told me that he used to study economy and finance
at Damascus University, until the civil war disrupted his education. As
the fighting escalated, a bomb fell on the house where his sister lived.
Abed rushed to her residence and discovered her and her husband in the
rubble. Abed eventually fled to Turkey. He worked odd jobs there until
just three months ago, when he had finally saved enough money to pay
smugglers for passage to Lesvos.

Abed invited me back to his tent, in the so-called forest camp, just
outside the walls of Moria. This was an overflow camp, a makeshift
bivouac, where as many as a thousand men lived in squalor. Abed, like
virtually everyone else at Moria, was waiting. He had applied for asylum
in Greece, but the process is so convoluted and drawn out that he had
little hope of receiving a verdict anytime soon. Meanwhile, his tent
leaked, and the nights grew colder. Camp residents and a number of
N.G.O.s feared that, with winter approaching, people would soon freeze to
death. The situation was stressful, he told me.

At one point, Abed reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and
removed a neatly folded piece of paper, which he treated with care. On
it was a date, three weeks away, when he would get an appointment with
the “psychological doctor.” He was lucky to have this, Abed insisted.
Rumor had it that you could only see a psychiatrist right away if you
had already tried to kill yourself. Suicide is a recurrent problem at
Moria and other camps like it. On the Greek island of Chios, one in three
refugees has witnessed a suicide, according to a
report by the Refugee Rights Data Project.

As we walked together, one of Abed’s friends—a gaunt Syrian man named
Ammar—invited us into his tent. Several men sat cross-legged inside,
staring into space. Ammar said that people in this tent discussed books
and ideas. Posted above the entrance to the tent, in scrawled Arabic,
was a sign that read, in part, “This tent is not exclusively for one
person. It is a home for every person in need, and would you please not
use filthy words, and don’t live without manners. You have to be a real
person even in the most difficult of situations.”

In March, 2016, the European Union unveiled a plan that it said would
control the influx of refugees in a humane and orderly fashion. This was
the basis for the so-called E.U.-Turkey deal. Under its terms, Turkey
agreed to stop asylum seekers from crossing, by sea, to Lesvos. In
return, Turkey got six billion
euros,
or 6.7 billion dollars, in aid. The money was to help cover the cost of
the three million Syrian
refugees who are living on Turkish soil. Finally, a limited number of Syrian
refugees, in Turkey, were targeted for resettlement in Europe.

The agreement was hailed as a victory—a breakthrough in the migrant
crisis and a way for E.U. nations to regain some control over who
settled within their borders. The problem is that it hasn’t worked. The
E.U. hasn’t taken many refugees from Turkey; the Turks have reduced but
failed to stop the flow of refugees to Greece; and rubber boats, filled
with desperate people, are still arriving in Lesvos almost every day.
Some of these new arrivals are incarcerated at Moria. A recent
report,
by the Council of Europe, noted that, during a visit in April, 2016,
observers found a hundred and seven adults (mostly Pakistanis) and
fifty-seven unaccompanied children detained in a special “closed”
compound within Moria. The report said that there was no access to
drinking water for the adults and only limited access for the children.

The situation on Lesvos, in all its misery, isn’t quite as random and
chaotic as it may seem. There is a larger strategy at play, not simply
neglect or indifference, Dimitris Christopoulos, the head of the
International Federation for Human Rights, told me. The E.U.’s intention
is to create a “buffer zone”—of Greek islands—that will absorb the
masses bound for Germany, Sweden, and France, he said. “This is
deliberately a message of deterrence on the part of the E.U.—‘if you
come here, this is what you are going to face,’ ” Christopoulos told me.
“This is why the E.U. turns a blind eye. This is why the situation is so
bad. There is complicity here. The goal is to prevent people from coming
to Europe. This mess is not an accident.”

Tensions on Lesvos are rising. The following day, I returned to the
Moria camp and saw a steady stream of aid workers walking out. They were being evacuated after a riot had erupted inside. The
camp’s Afghan and Arab residents were fighting—kicking, punching, and
throwing stones at one another. Women and families fled the camp as
well.

Outside the front gate, I spoke with an Afghan couple. The husband,
Jasam, stood protectively next to his wife, Zahra, who was eight months
pregnant. According to Greek and E.U. law, Zahra, as a pregnant mother,
is a “vulnerable person” who should be sent to the mainland, where she
can access improved accommodations and services. And yet she showed me
her paperwork rejecting her vulnerable status. Renata Rendón, a policy
expert at Oxfam, said that this wasn’t surprising. According to Rendón,
the screening process often doesn’t work properly. Instead, people are
simply “shuffled through the system” so they can be sent back to Turkey,
she said.

For her part, Zahra said that she refused to stay at Moria any longer.
“We have decided to go sleep somewhere out there in the jungle tonight,”
she told me, pointing to the forest surrounding the camp. Another woman,
nearby, was nursing a head wound on her three-year-old. He had been hit
with a rock. “It’s not secure inside,” she told me. “If they can’t help
us, I’ll jump into the sea.”

That evening, hundreds of Afghan families who had fled the fighting
gathered outside the entrance to Moria and refused to reënter the
compound. Several other young children had been wounded in the
fighting, including a six-year-old with a gash across his skull.
Together, the families chanted, in English, “Moria is not safe!”

The next morning, Jasam, Zahra, and a hundred or so other, mostly
Afghan, refugees decided that the only way to draw attention to their
plight was to leave Moria and protest in the town of Mytilene. They set
out on foot, walking along the highway. A deployment of Greek riot
police, armed with shields and batons, stopped them halfway to town. And
there they remained, in the hot midday sun, for the next several hours.
When I approached some of the Afghans, to interview them, they
recognized me and surged forward. The police pushed them back. A shoving
match ensued. When more of the Afghans heaved forward, the police
relented, allowing the men, women, and children to pass and continue
down the highway to Mytilene.

Later that night, the Afghans assembled in a square at the center of the
town. Children slept under blankets with their mothers beside them. In
nearby cafés, tourists sipped ouzo and ate calamari. “We will spend the
night here,” Zahra told me. “And we will be here until we get our
demands. We want the Greek authorities to let us leave Lesvos.” I asked
Zahra if she was worried about her unborn child, who was due in just
twenty days. She shrugged and whispered, “Germany.”

So far, the E.U.-Turkey deal has failed. The flow of refugees into
Europe is neither orderly nor safe. At the same time, E.U. countries
like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic are declining to take
refugees, like those on Lesvos, who are seeking safety. All the while,
Greeks see a double standard. Though other E.U. countries largely refuse
to accept migrants, they have accepted refugees and also adopted
E.U.-backed austerity measures in the wake of the financial crisis. The
European Commission announced on Thursday that it was suing Poland,
Hungary, and the Czech Republic in the European Court of Justice for not
accepting refugees.

All of the refugees who I met on Lesvos were hoping to get asylum so that
they could escape the island and continue onto the mainland.
Alternatively, they may be deported. If and when a deportation order
comes through, they will be out of options. On my last day in Lesvos, I
met with a Pakistani refugee named Atif, who had been living on a
mountaintop for the last year in a glade, partially concealed by trees
and bushes. Atif told me that he had no hope of getting asylum, so he,
and a dozen others, had holed up here. The view from his hideaway was
stunning—arid cliffs, gleaming black-stone beaches, and a wine-dark sea.
I asked Atif how long he could really last, up here, on the cliffs. He
looked at me as if I fundamentally misunderstood the nature of his
predicament. “I don’t know,” he said. “One year . . . six months . . . one day. I don’t know.”