Not the stereotypical tropical island.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=215094&thesection=news&thesubsection=world
06.09.2001 KATHY MARKS and RODNEY JOYCE look at what the Afghan asylum-seekers will find in Nauru.
"Are they coming here?" asked the receptionist at the Hotel Menen in Nauru, sounding breathless with excitement.
"We have many rooms free at the moment."
The impending arrival of 310 asylum-seekers has sent a wave of excitement through Nauru, a tiny speck in the South Pacific. Visitors are a rare commodity, because Nauru has no tourist attractions and just one export - bird droppings.
For the island's 12,000 people, the prospect of refugees from Afghanistan is positively exotic.
What the Afghans will make of Nauru, a polluted lunar landscape ravaged by a century of phosphate mining, is anyone's guess.
When they fled a repressive regime, desperate for a better future, they could scarcely have predicted what lay in store.
Shipwreck on the high seas. Salvation by kindly Norwegians. The arrival of Australian SAS commandos in full combat gear. Treated like pariahs by Australia, the country that embodied their aspirations and dreams.
Now, after a week aboard the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa in the Indian Ocean, with the Australian territory of Christmas Island shimmering tantalisingly on the horizon, the asylum-seekers are about to embark on yet another leg of their odyssey.
They are to be shipped to Papua New Guinea by an Australian Navy troop carrier and then flown to Nauru or - in the case of 150 of them - to New Zealand.
Once their asylum claims have been processed, those deemed genuine refugees will be resettled by several nations, including Australia, Norway and New Zealand.
The decision to send most of the Tampa's occupants to Nauru was condemned by the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who said that they would be better off on Christmas Island, and by Norway, whose Foreign Minister, Thorbjoern Jagland, called it inhumane.
The Afghans will spend up to six months on Nauru, but not at the Hotel Menen, one of two hotels on the island.
Australian officials are on their way to Nauru to set up a tent city to accommodate them.
Nauru, described by one guidebook as "a wasteland of mind-boggling proportions", could not be further from the cliched image of a South Pacific idyll.
Most of the island is uninhabitable because of environmental devastation, so the population clings to a narrow coastal strip.
Electricity is rationed to two hours a day and drinking water is imported from Australia. Nauru's single-plane airline was recently grounded as unsafe.
The island's rich phosphate deposits, extracted from guano, or fossilised bird droppings, once gave Nauruans the world's second highest income per head.
But they invested their money unwisely, their industry is in sharp decline and the country - also notorious as an international money-laundering centre - is near bankruptcy.
One of their worst investments was in a West End show about the painter Leonardo da Vinci. Nauru's rulers flew to London for the premiere in 1993, but the show flopped, running for less than a month.
Nauruans have famously poor health, suffering high rates of heart disease, cancer and diabetes since they gave up their diet of fresh fish and used their wealth to fly in planeloads of junk food.
Like many South Pacific nations, Nauru is being engulfed by rising tides as a result of global warming.
When an aircraft lands at Nauru's airport, traffic stops.
The world's smallest independent republic, Nauru is tucked just south of the equator in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and covers 21 sq km.
The main road crosses the airport apron, only a couple of signs warning motorists not to turn off on to the runway.
But motorists have bigger problems than dodging Air Nauru's sole Boeing 737-400 as it taxis to the terminal.
Nauru, once so rich from the mining of its phosphate reserves that it was known as the "Kuwait of the South Pacific", is now so broke it cannot always afford petrol.
Diesel supplies for power generation are scarce, leading to frequent blackouts, and aviation fuel is also in short supply.
With phosphate reserves at the point of exhaustion, Nauru's 12,000 people have little to show for a mining operation that has turned their land into a moonscape and left them with a taste for imported processed foods and an associated diabetes epidemic.
They have no other export industries and, in looking for new income, have been snared in a money-laundering web.
The US Treasury department estimates $US70 billion ($162.4 billion) moved through the island from Russia in 1998 alone.
Called "Pleasant Island" by a passing English ship captain in 1798, Nauru is now 80 per cent covered in mine tailings and weeds.
Almost midway between Australia and Hawaii, it has lived off the mining of high-grade phosphate - fossilised remains of centuries of bird droppings used in fertiliser - since 1907.
British, Australian and New Zealand interests began the extraction and Nauru carried on after independence in 1968.
The three former rulers signed an $A107 million compensation deal in the early 1990s and, from royalties and land rents, a trust built up to $A2 billion ($2.4 at today's exchange rates) in assets.
But heavy Government borrowing against the savings has left only a net $A400 million in the fund. .
President Rene Harris offers an optimistic face to the world.
"We have investments that have been made over the past 20 years and we hope that by the time the phosphate is finished we should be reaping the benefits," he says.
But many on the island believe little will be left after land rehabilitation costs, estimated by some at up to $A300 million, are paid.
With Asian Development Bank help, Nauru is reforming the investment policies of its trust to hold onto what is left.
MONEY LAUNDERING
Nauruans see few visitors on their remote island. It has extensive real estate holdings in Australia and Hawaii and wants to lease fishing rights in its seas, if it can find a way to supervise them.
It is also studying whether to mine old phosphate sites for lower-quality material which might extend the current five-year life of its mining by up to 15 years.
A more lucrative option has been financial services. Four hundred foreign banks trade through the Nauru Post Office.
Identified by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as a haven for money launderers, Nauru is about to pass a law to stop financial crime.
But the Government is determined that Nauru will not bow to demands that it also end its tax-free status. The OECD sees this as unfair tax competition, but Nauru claims it as a sovereign right.
"It is alarming that, now that we have identified a viable, legitimate and competitive economic opportunity, the rich states of this world have labelled it harmful competition simply because the rich countries choose not to compete," President Harris recently told a summit of the 16-country Pacific Islands Forum.
UNCERTAIN FUTURE
Nauruans need little excuse to celebrate, with copious quantities of beer imported, as are almost all foodstuffs, from Australia.
But ask locals what the future holds for them and they shrug their shoulders and ask if it is worth staying.
Nauruan land-owning families typically drive late-model cars, courtesy of an average $A10,000 a year they get for the mining of their land. But wages at the Nauru Phosphate Commission are running two weeks behind schedule.
"There is no running water at school for kids, food goes rotten in fridges and freezers without power, people can't sleep because of no fans and people can't work," says the island's bluntest critic, an independent newsletter, Visionary.
During the Forum meeting, only one of the two hotels had hot water - at the other, guests had to keep a bucket filled in the shower in case the cold water also gave out.
DYING FROM WEALTH
Nauru's people have other problems.
Their unhealthy eating habits and a genetic propensity for an obesity-triggered form of diabetes mean the hospital is full of patients suffering complications such as amputations, kidney and heart disease.
Specialist Paul Zimmet, from Melbourne's International Diabetes Institute, said 40 to 45 per cent of Nauruan adults had diabetes, part of a Pacific-wide epidemic now affecting children.
Pacific Island people have a gene that some scientists believe helps them store excess energy as fat, perhaps a throwback to surviving famines and long sea journeys.
"Today you don't have this feast-famine scenario, you just have a continual feast and they just keep putting on fat," Mr Zimmet said.
Rather than expensive medicines, the solution, Mr Zimmet says, might be to force Nauruans off processed food and out of cars.
"I suggested to the Nauruans six or seven years ago, when they still had a lot of money, that ... they build a huge gymnasium, swimming pool, exercise facilities."
- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS