March 6, 2001

by Michael Field

Its a political crisis you can only have in the Pacific -- a besieged president ailing in an Australian hotel, suspicious Russians with dirty money, a national airline forbidden from flying and an island and people blighted by the outside world.

Nauru’s 18 seat Parliament was on March 1 supposed to hold a vote of no confidence in President Bernard Dowiyogo over his country’s role as the secret banker to the Russian Mafia.

But as he and his wife were in Melbourne undergoing diabetic related amputations of parts of their feet Canberra grounded the state-owned Air Nauru, cutting off Nauru and Kiribati.

Nauru, just south of the Equator 4,400 kilometres (2,700 kilometres) north of here, is home to 10,500 people living on a single 21 square kilometre (eight square mile). Around 3,000 are Kiribati and Tuvaluan guest-workers with no political rights.

When an Englishman first called in 1798 he honoured its beauty calling it Pleasant Island.

It was the 20th Century than nearly killed the Nauruans. Germans in 1907 begin strip mining Nauru’s topsoil which contained the richest lodes of phosphate in the world. In one of the grand Pacific myths this phosphate is attributed to multi-millennium loads of bird droppings -- in fact is probably the result of marine life trapped when the island rose. Banaba, another island 300 kilometres (190 miles) to the east, was also as rich.

With World War One both islands came under the less than benign control of a quasi government organisation, the British Phosphate Commission. It paid virtually nothing to the Banabans or Nauruans but tore off the topsoil and shipped it to Australian and New Zealand farmers.

The Japanese occupied Nauru during World War Two and kidnapped 1200 Nauruans for slaves on Chuuk (then Truk). On January 31, 1946, -- marked as Nauru’s national day -- a ship arrived at Nauru with the 793 survivors. They were greeted with incredulity by 1400 Nauruans who had stayed and narrowly escaped Tokyo’s orders that they too be massacred. The Banabans, who had also been kidnapped, were never allowed to return and their descendants today live in Rabi in Fiji; their homeland is a bleached coral wasteland.

Nauru finally won independence in 1968 with around two thirds of the island like a bleak moonscape. They’ve continued the mining and now only the coastal fringe is inhabitable. Their mining, for a time, made them the richest people, per capita, in the world.

But mismanagement and scandal was legendary, illustrated by its involvement in a worthless prime bank note scam and a bombed out London musical called “Leonardo”.

What was worse was that Nauruans used their wealth to give up local fresh foods and had the airline fly in a steady diet of junk food. The consequences have been severe with appalling rates of gout, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, alcoholism and high road fatalities. The hospital dialysis schedule is published in the local news sheet daily.

Historian Nancy Pollock of Wellington's Victoria University has argued that many of Nauru's social and health problems are a legacy of the Japanese which left them with a "severe mistrust of anyone who was not Nauruan....

"The Americans had bombed them, the Australians had apparently abandoned them, and the Japanese had beaten them and starved them so who could they trust but their fellow Nauruans."

Life expectancy at birth for a Nauruan boy is just 55 -in contrast to a New Zealand boy who has 74 years to look to.

Dowiyogo, born of Japanese and Gilbertese descent in February 1946, has just turned 55. With failing kidneys he is a seriously ill man and now barely able to live in his own country.

As phosphate prices fell and ran out and property investments literally fell into ruin, Dowiyogo, who has served numerous terms as president, turned Nauru into a tax haven operation.

Last week the US State Department report on the drug trade warned that Nauru “present significant opportunities for the laundering of the proceeds of crime, and allow criminals who make use of those systems to increase significantly their chances to evade effective investigation or punishment”.

It said Russian organised crime had exploited Nauru and used the example of “Sinex Bank”, a registered offshore bank in Nauru which laundered 3 billion US dollars through the Bank of New York. Russia’s central bank has claimed 70 billion dollars has gone through Nauru’s 400 offshore banks registered to one mail box owned by the government’s Nauru Agency Corporation.

Nauru had, it said, made “verbal commitments” to fix its system, but “no concrete action has been forthcoming”.

Nothing has happened but last month 11 MPs signed a petition demanding Parliament be recalled and the president made to explain.

Six days before Parliament was to sit Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority grounded Air Nauru’s two Boeing 737s saying it did not have sound management and its airport in Nauru was below acceptable standards.

So now Nauru is again isolated, visited only by the occasional phosphate ship, with more of its ailing leadership, and some of its critics, in Australia with no where to go.

Copyright: Michael Field