Greece shipped over 200 migrants back to Turkey today, the first wave of deportations under a hugely controversial deal aimed at easing Europe's worst postwar migration crisis.
The orderly return of the 202 migrants aboard three chartered Turkish ferries stood in stark contrast to the journey many have taken over perilous seas in flimsy life jackets aboard crowded and leaky rubber dinghies.
Two boats left the Greek island of Lesbos at dawn, and another from the island of Chios, carrying mostly economic migrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan who Turkey will eventually deport to their home countries.
The first to be deported under the deal arrived at the Turkish Aegean resort of Dikili to a heavy security presence on the harbourside and media kept at a distance by metal barriers, according to AFP reporters at the scene.
"The taking of fingerprints, the landing at the port, medical checks ... The transport of the 202 people in buses to reception centres in Kirklareli (on the Bulgarian border), is all taking place successfully," said Mustafa Toprak, governor of Turkey's Izmir region.
Yorgos Kyritsis, Greece's migration spokesman, said the first wave contained citizens from Iran, Congo, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Ivory Coast and Somalia.
Only two were from Syria and they had requested to return for personal reasons, Kyritsis said.
The grim-faced deportees were boarded onto the boats by security guards from the EU's Frontex border agency wearing sanitary face masks.
Facing an unprecedented influx that has threatened to tear the bloc apart, the EU clinched a last-ditch deal with Turkey to take back all migrants landing in Greece after March 20.
In a heavily criticised swap deal, the EU has pledged to rehouse one Syrian in the bloc for every one deported from Greece, with numbers capped at 72,000.
And the EU kept its side of the pact with 32 asylum seekers from Syria flying into the German city of Hanover.
European leaders hope this will discourage migrants from risking the crossing that has claimed 366 lives this year alone and break up the lucrative racket that smuggled about one million migrants into Europe last year.
However, rights groups have slammed the pact as inhumane and a blow to the right to request asylum, and protesters on Lesbos brandished banners reading: "Stop the dirty deal", "stop deportations" and "wake up Europe".
Amnesty International has accused Turkey of not being a safe country for refugees by forcibly returning Syrians back home to their war-torn countries -- a charge Ankara rejects.
"The returns today are in many ways symbolic," said Gauri Vangulik, Deputy Europe director for Amnesty International.
"They are the first starting point of what is to become really one of the most disastrous episodes in European asylum policy.
