STORY SUNDAY: Paradise Lost: The Tale of Nauru

(My apologies for such a looong blog post. I just thought this was a fascinating subject, and I was compelled to write about it. And once you start digging on this subject, well, go ahead and read, if you've got the time. -- Jim)



Tell me a Tale of Nauru

Somewhere in the seas of the South Pacific, amid a deep blue paradise in a corner of the world you’ll probably never see, lies a tiny tragedy.

Isolated from the nearest scrap of land by 250 miles of ocean and separated from the nearest continent by nearly 2,000 miles, there exists an anthropologically distinct group of people. There are few sights there apart from coral pinnacles and miles of open ocean. But one sight those people wish they had never seen is the first mast of a European ship on the horizon. For since then, this tiny secluded ocean paradise would never be the same. It would be wracked by corruption, disease, obesity, poverty, fraud, thievery, spectacularly bad investments, and even deeper tragedies.

This is the land of the people constantly making deals with the devil. Once the richest people in the world, they are now among the poorest, least employed and least healthy. A people who have lost nearly everything by selling the very island from right underneath their feet.

No one knows how the inhabitants got here. And, partly because of their poor decisions, bad deals and bad luck, no one knows how long they’ll be able to stay.

Welcome to Nauru

If you should depart Los Angeles heading West-Southwest into the largest ocean in the world, and maintain that bearing for a little over 2,500 miles, you’ll come to Honolulu. Stay on the exact same course for another 2,880 miles, and you’ll come, at length, to a tiny island called Nauru.

Pronounced NAIR-oo, which makes it sound a bit like a world in Star Wars, Nauru is every bit as remote as that connotation would imply. It lies 26 miles south of the equator. It is the smallest independent republic in the world (as a nation, it ranks third-tiniest, behind only Vatican City and Monaco). At just 8 sq. mi., it’s just a tad larger than 5,000 acres, 50 percent smaller than the campus of Stanford University. The circumference of the oval-shaped island, a ring of beachfront property, is just over 10 ¾ miles. A reasonably fast distance runner could run a lap around the island in an hour.

Much of the land inside that ring of beaches is uninhabited and, as we shall soon see, uninhabitable.

About 12,000 people, fewer than you’d find at your typical American arena rock concert, live on Nauru. Their ancestors have been there for thousands of years, and no one is quite sure how. To understand that, we must take a small scientific detour.

Anthropology’s accepted view is that modern human beings first sprang up in Africa and then spread out in two waves. Yet recently, human fossils have been found in Australia and the Polynesian islands that are much older than this theory supports. At no time in human history were Australia and the Polynesian Islands attached to mainland Asia. Somehow, though, people proliferated throughout the thousands of islands of the South Pacific, long before the accepted date when humans could speak or engage in the type of cooperative efforts it takes to build an ocean-worthy craft and set out toward terra incognita.

Yet for thousands of years, they have been there. From New Zealand to French Polynesia. From Christmas Island to tiny Palau. From The United States’ Marshall Islands to Fiji. Humans have been living there for thousands of years, and they’ve made quite an instructive experiment in physical, as well as cultural, evolution. Over the ages, the individual peoples and their cultures have grown quite distinct. Thus, Nauru’s language (Nauruan, natch) is completely distinct from all other languages of the South Pacific. Ninety percent of Nauruans speak Nauruan in their homes, and it is spoken nowhere else on Earth.

So this is where the story begins. On a remote, solitary island in the middle of an ocean of… well… ocean.

You’ll want to stop to think at this point what that type of isolation means. As Americans, we’re conditioned to think of isolation as relaxing; sort of a reward for succeeding in the rat race. So we think of isolation as paradise. Imagine, though, living hundreds of miles from any land and thousands of miles from anywhere where things are produced. Need a new chain for your bicycle, for instance? There’s no running out to the store to get one. In a place where Australian rules football is a popular sport, what happens if they need a new ball? There are no sporting goods stores, and no one on the island can make a leather ball, since there are no cattle raised there. Just about everything, including all fresh water, must be shipped there, in all-too-infrequent arrivals of cargo vessels.

If that thought doesn’t do it for you, simply look at some pictures from Nauru. Islanders wear Western t-shirts with a 20-year-old Nike logo on them. When you look at living conditions, well, let’s just say there’s no Home Depot around the corner.

And with that in mind, let’s rewind the tape back to 1798, when Nauru had not one of what we consider the comforts modern life, and the first English ship approached its shores.

Avarice and Bird Shit

As the 18th century gave way to the 19th, Nauru had a handful more than 1,000 inhabitants. With humans’ natural proclivity to divide and sub-divide, these people were each part of one of 12 traditional “clans.” A look at Nauru’s flag is instructive, perhaps, because it shows a star on a field of blue just below a yellow line, which indicates Nauru’s position relative to the equator. The 12-pointed star represents the traditional clans.

The people wore grass skirts and little else. There was no need for clothes in the year-round tropical climate. They lived simply but had advanced beyond hunter-gatherer status. Though there are no native mammals to trap, Nauruans caught ocean fish, acclimatized them to a freshwater lagoon, and raised them there. They caught birds as they landed on the shore. They also supped on fresh fruit, including pineapples, bananas and coconuts. There were no mosquitoes and no disease. Simply paradise. Although there can be no proof, I imagine that the people, who had lived together for thousands of years with no outside influence – and probably not even knowing what outside influence even existed – were probably content and happy.

A British captain named John Fearn, sailing a whaling boat in the South Pacific, was the first Westerner to visit the island and, as is so often the case, he named the place. In this case, he named it “Pleasant Island,” even though it already had a perfectly good name (“Naoero,” which was hard for Westerners to pronounce).

As sea travel became more widespread, whalers, beachcombers and deserters began to visit and even live on the island. And in the early 1800’s, Nauru got its first international commerce.

Nauru had not discovered alcoholic beverages, and when British sailors introduced toddy to them (a liquor made from palm sap), they gave what they had in trade.

Alcoholism is a problem in Nauru still.

Later, Nauruans eagerly traded the Western boats for firearms. Almost immediately, these firearms were used in a decade-long civil war between the clans, which killed roughly 35 percent of the people on the island, reducing the population from 1,400 to 900. What other purpose would they have for firearms? You will recall that Nauru has no native mammals for hunting.

Nauru’s acclimatizing to the modern world was not off to a propitious start. One could say, more than 200 years later, that it’s still not going so well.

Just after the brutal civil war, Nauru was annexed by Germany, a country nearly 9,000 miles away. Note that it’s difficult to get much farther away on planet Earth. The center of United States is closer to Australia and China than Nauru is to Germany.

These days, Nauru is an independent republic. And approaching Nauru from the sea, it looks like any of the tropical oases we Americans might be used to, if a bit less modern. Coconut palms and pandanus trees thrive near the sandy beaches, and green vegetation grows in the fertile ground. But this postcard view from the sea shrouds the skeleton in Nauru’s closet. Behind the veil of lush seaside vegetation is a massive scar, encompassing most of the island. On the island, it is known as topside, and it is Nauru’s great national embarrassment.

Journalist Jack Hitt told the story of the day when the only cab driver in Nauru took him for a tour around the island. Here he describes, with unimprovable vividness, the moment that the cab turned topside:

Right away the trees disappeared. I immediately saw that the palms and pandanus you see on the shore are a kind of scrim -- a curtain; hiding from sight one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.

Almost all of Nauru is missing. Picked clean. Right down to the coral skeleton supporting the island. It’s a haunting landscape of dug out stone channels, formed by limestone towers and coral outcroppings. All blindingly white, under an intense, equatorial sun.

The winding channels among these coral spires are lined with an appallingly silky dirt and old, filthy trash, too expensive to export from the island blows around this blistering desert. Shreds of plastic bags snag on bits of coral, and feral dogs hunt in the canals.

[The cabbie] told me how when he was a child, all of this was dense tropical forest.

We sat in the hissing silence for a while. There was no breeze. Just fine talc. Airborne and stagntant.

What in the world happened to most of Nauru, you ask? Well, it seems that about 100 years after the first mainlanders arrived, one of them discovered that a chunk of rock from the island proved to be the richest phosphate ore ever assayed.

Phosphate is a valuable resource, used mainly to produce fertilizer but also used in animal feed supplements and industrial chemicals. Especially before artificial fertilizers were invented, phosphate was one of the most prized resources in international commerce. It turned out that Nauru was full of phosphate, to the point where it was, in a very literal way, made of the stuff.

How did that happen? The answer is guano. Guano, for those of you who don’t recognize the word, is bird shit.

Specifically, it’s seabird bird shit. You see, Nauru has been a remote outpost for eons. And for all of those years, Nauru was, for seabirds, the prehistoric equivalent of the rest area you encounter after miles of turnpike driving. Simply pile up ages of the stuff, bake it under a blazing sun 26 miles from the equator and compost it for thousands of years under a tropical jungle, and you’ve got valuable phosphoric rock.

It took at least a million years for this to happen, but the period between the moment of discovery by an Australian chemist and the moment when an industrial consortium began mining it and hauling it away in mass quantities was a scanty six years.

As the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand hauled away the bulk of Nauru, Nauruans earned only 2 percent of the total profits.

Distinguished science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once said famously that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This being true, it would be understandable if Nauruans had little idea what was happening while the Pacific Phosphate Company commenced that hauling away of their island. Perhaps I’m fancifying and simplifying this notion a bit, but maybe all the Nauruans knew was that the strangers with the vast knowledge and the powerful machines were doing something in the center of the island with material for which the islanders had little use. And in exchange, the islanders got to enjoy a slightly elevated standard of living and be exposed to new and fascinating technologies.

But at what cost? While the world’s farms flourished on Nauru’s phosphates, bewildered islanders gave away their island, parting with their greatest asset: the very land beneath their feet.

The Vortex

Never terribly far from bad luck, it wasn’t long before Nauru again became a pawn in someone else’s game. While the mainlanders continued to happily cart away Nauru’s very island, World War I came and Australian forces seized control of the island from Germany in 1914. In the wake of the war, the League of Nations gave a trustee mandate over Nauru to Austraila, New Zealand and the UK. The three countries formed a commission to continue denuding the island of its phosphate.

Nauru continued to swirl in a vortex of outside powers completely beyond its control. In August of 1942, Japanese forces occupied the island and built an airfield. This lasted seven months, until the United States bombed the island, destroying the airfield and preventing food supplies from reaching Nauru and causing starvation. The Japanese Army deported more than 1,000 Nauruans to the Chuuk Islands to work as laborers, where 463 of them died. The island was liberated from Japanese control in 1945, and the laborers, or those remaining anyway, returned home in 1946.

Naturally, phosphate mining resumed.

Happy Days

Liberated, hopeful, and thrust into modern times, Nauru took immense strides forward in the following decades. The island became self-governing in 1966 and became independent in 1968. In June 1970, all rights to mining became locally owned, with the passage of rights to the Nauru Phosphate Corporation. Suddenly, the tiny island enjoyed terrific prosperity. By the late 1980s, the country enjoyed the highest per capita income in the world.

Let me repeat that. For a time in the late 1980s, Nauru had a higher per capita income than ALL other nations IN THE WORLD.

The Nauruans, with no preparation for the fluctuations between boom times and recession, basked in their newfound wealth. Thousands of Nauruans bought cars, including expensive Italian sports cars, even though you could go anywhere on the island with a short walk. They bought motor boats and satellite TV and imported a diet of highly processed Western food for which, we shall see, their bodies were spectacularly unprepared.

All of this was unprecedented for Nauru. As far as they knew, this was how the rest of the world lived. Signs of prosperity were everywhere. And lost in their televisions, video game systems and expensive machinery, it was easy to forget about the large portion of their island which was now missing.

They could even distract themselves with a round on Nauru’s brand new… golf course. Yes, Nauru built a nine-hole golf course in the middle of an ocean on an island of eight square miles.

After millennia of being a natural paradise, Nauru transformed itself into a Western paradise of consumerism and hedonism.

Still, like the strong coral formations that support Nauru from beneath, this new era was based on solid planning. Founding president Hammer DeRoburt had the foresight to realize that someday, all of the phosphate would be gone. So he established a trust fund, to keep the money rolling in, saying, “I feel very sure of this, the forecast of income in the time when there will me no more phosphate. It compares quite favorably with what is being received today. This is from the investment of funds which are being invested today.”

The trust fund swelled to $1.5 Billion Australian. Converted to U.S. dollars and adjusted for inflation, that comes to nearly $1.7 Billion U.S. in today’s currency.

With that money in a money market account making a safe 5 percent, the people of Nauru would be set for life. That translates to nearly $5,000 in interest alone for every islander, every year, forever. The interest alone would put Nauruans’ per capita income higher than that of almost all of their South Pacific neighbors (if they could be considered that).

But alas, unrelenting waves have been lapping at Nauru’s shores. And less than 30 years after the trust fund and Nauruan prosperity hit their zenith, the golf course is gone. So are the Lamborghinis. And so is every bit of the money.

Bad Ideas, Bad Deals and Bad Advice

Unless you are a devoted scholar of the stage or have a kind of secret schadenfreude for studying the worst stage flops of all time, you have probably never heard of Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love.

In the flimsy script, Leonardo da Vinci is portrayed as having an amorous relationship with the fiancée of Francesco Del Giocondo; she is the woman better known as the subject of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s most famous painting. After an amorous affair, Leonardo impregnates “Lisa” and is murdered by Del Giocondo.

Never mind, of course, that in real life Leonardo was very probably homosexual. This play had more problems. The script, the sets, the costumes… nothing seemed to be right. On opening night at the Strand Theatre in London on June 3, 1993, most of the audience departed before the final curtain fell. The play ran for just five weeks before closing for good as one of the most memorable flops in British theatre history.

I mention this story not in the interest of brushing up your knowledge on the history of British theatre nor to tell you a joke, though the story certainly qualifies. I mention it here because these are the types of investments into which Nauru sunk its considerable wealth.

The play had been the brainchild of Duke Minks, who also happened to be an advisor to Nauru. With his advice, Nauru backed the play and lost $5 Million.

British theatre critics were only too happy to report that the play had been financed by bird shit and, well, garbage in, garbage out, you know, old chap?

This might be the most amusing example of Nauru’s staggeringly efficient financial mismanagement, but it is certainly not the biggest.

Nauru built a high-rise office building in Melbourne called the Nauru House. The trust also built a tower and five luxury condo buildings in Honolulu and other upper-crust real estate in Australia, Fiji, Guam, the Philippines, New Zealand, the UK, Samoa and the USA.

Most of the real estate was phenomenally mismanaged. Some plots of land were sold undeveloped. Nauru took out loans to pay back its debts and then failed to pay those back, leading to the seizure of their real estate assets.

I mentioned earlier that Nauru is passionate about Australian Rules Football. That may explain why, in the mid-90s, the Nauru Phosphate Corporation floated a loan of millions to the struggling Fitzroy Football Club, which sank anyway and went into liquidation in 1996.

Everywhere, there were thieves outside the gates of Nauru, which, it must be said, was not burdened with a great deal of sophistication. Imagine a 10-year-old who had never been exposed to the Internet and who had inherited many millions of dollars (“Why yes! I will help a struggling prince liberate millions of dollars from the Bank of Nigeria in exchange for a percentage of that fortune. That seems like a sound investment!”) and you’ve got something of the sense of it.

Once, their Boeing 737, Air Nauru’s only airplane, was seized on the runway to repay debts. A new plane replaced it a year later and air travel to the island resumed thanks to financial help from Taiwan.

Corrupt politicians took care of the rest of the money. After the foresight and prudent leadership of DeRoburt’s term ended in 1976, Nauruans elected a long line of exceptionally incompetent presidents, some of whom drained the country’s cash reserves to pay for flights on the Concorde or gifts of jewelry for their wives. The situation was such that Nauru brought DeRoburt back for a second term after a failed administration (1978-86). And then a third. And then a fourth. Then Nauru went through 17 administration changes between 1999 and 2003. For the last four years of that period, two presidents, Bernard Dowiyogo and Rene Harris (a convicted felon), ruled for alternating periods following a series of no-confidence votes from the parliament. In December, 2007, Nauru elected Marcus Stephen, a former international medalist in weightlifting, to the country’s top office. He is in power still, although the government does not have enough money to perform basic acts such as provide for employment or health care.

As we will see shortly, both of those situations have become dire.

Anything for a Buck

With all the money gone, the century-long sell-off of Nauru’s only asset became a source of deep national embarrassment and shame. These days the mere subject elicits a cringe or a change of subject from any Nauruan on the island. But some of the dealings in which Nauru became involved after the money disappeared have been just as cringe-worthy.

Searching for streams of income, Nauru became a money laundering center. Anyone, worldwide, could establish an unregulated bank on Nauru for just $25,000. Although the “banks” were nothing more than a few files on a computer in an otherwise empty building, billions of dirty dollars ran through Nauru. Additionally, Nauru offered foreigners passports for a fee. Sure, it was all messy business, but at least it was much-needed income.

Another opportunity to make a buck sprang up in 2001, when a Norwegian ship carrying refugees from countries such as Afghanistan sought to dock in Australia. The Australian government refused and instead developed what it called “the Pacific Soltuion,” in which the boat would be diverted to Nauru and the refugees would be kept in a detention center there, in exchange for millions of dollars in Australian aid to the island. Willing to do anything for a buck and gainful employment for its citizens, Nauru happily agreed.

Despite objections from human rights activists worldwide, Nauru detained the refugees for years, only closing the center in 2008.

The closure of the detention center cut off aid and put 100 Nauruans out of work in an economy that could scarcely afford the blow.

Now, 90 percent of Nauru is unemployed. Ninety-five percent of those who do work are employed by the government. There are no new emerging economies. Few prospects for the future. Precious little inhabitable land.

It’s OK to cringe.

Sick and Overweight is no Way to go through Life, Son

As mentioned above, Nauru elected a former world-class weightlifter as its president. But before you accuse Nauru of taking its cues from the great state of California, you should know that weightlifting has become a Nauruan national obsession.

The people of Nauru, you see, are massive.

I don’t mean “massive” in the sense of the tall Maasai people. They are not exceptionally tall and they aren’t all particularly well muscled.

The people of Nauru are simply fat. Ninety percent have a BMI higher than the world average.

Though some fruit does still grow on the island and fish and local birds are eaten in a limited scale, their diet consists now of almost entirely Western food, processed enough to make the days-long ocean voyage to Nauruan shores.

Nauru now sports the highest level in the world of type 2 diabetes. More than 40 percent of the population is affected, and without proper medical care, people are losing limbs and dying. At one time, seriously ill patients could be treated in Australia, but after Nauru defaulted on some medical bills, the offer was rescinded.

The people also suffer from renal failure, heart disease and other ailments related directly to their diet.

Of course all of this – the obesity, the diabetes, the renal trouble – makes perfect evolutionary sense. The people of Nauru lived and bred for millennia on their tiny island. They share extremely similar DNA and they are genetically predisposed to diabetes. They were never exposed to any cereals such as wheat and rice, nor to any sugar but the natural stuff found in pineapples and bananas.

Nothing in their hundreds of generations prepared them for refined sugar or refined flour; or any wheat for that matter. The Nauruans, it seems, had survived off the land, in the middle of nowhere, living only by their wits, guile and resourcefulness. Yet nothing in their evolutionary arsenal prepared them for a simple loaf of bread.

Additionally, first-world influences helped Nauru to balloon from 1,000 people 200 years ago to 12,000 in the present day. At 1,000, the island had found its apparent population equilibrium. Only with mass-produced food being shipped in could 12,000 people be supported. And there is no chance, even with modern food-growing techniques, of producing food topside, among the craggy limestone spires.

A little over 200 years ago, Nauru was an independent, lush paradise. In the interim, the island has completely prostrated itself to the modern world. It has had much of its island carted off in big ships. It has been proven naïve in big-business financial deals. And now it depends upon lands hundreds of miles away to bring them their life-sustaining food, which makes them obese and very sick.

Of course, I’m not holding the Nauruans completely harmless; much of this they did bring upon themselves. They made a series of deals with the devil and suffered the nearly inevitable consequences.

Operation Weasel

These days, in our corner of the world, those of us in dire financial straits have come to desire a full bailout by the United States government. In fact, it’s become quite the fashion. Just this week, representatives from the pornographic industry asked the government for $5 Billion. The tiny town of Edwardsville, AL asked for $375 Million, which comes to nearly $2 Million per person for Edwardsville’s 194 residents.

So, how does this relate to our story? Did the United States government offer Nauru a total bailout?

Bingo. It did (allegedly), in another deal with the devil bizarre even by Nauruan standards.

Here’s what supposedly happened, although the United States is denying it. Uncle Sam offered to return Nauru to paradise. The government would fund schools, fisheries, desalinization plants and tourist attractions. In return, Nauru would cease their illegal banking and passport operations. The US was motivated by a fear that those passports would end up in the hands of terrorists. And America had more demands. The US asked Nauru to hold it harmless for international war crimes (a more-or-less expected provision for any international deal brokered under a Bush White House). Additionally, the CIA would use Nauru as a listening post in the South Pacific. Lastly, Nauru would be used as a midway point for North Korean scientists who wished to defect to the West.

The operation was called, quite beautifully, Operation:Weasel.

Though Nauru had grown usefully wary of deals offered by first-world powers, it finally took the deal after some delay. President Dowiyogo, in his seventh administration, made a trip to Washington and then signed the deal. Days later, he died of heart disease.

Nauru held up its end of the deal. It discontinued its banking and passport operations, two of the few remaining income streams on the island. At this point, the United States apparently said, “What deal?”

None of the aid ever came to Nauru. The republic has gotten a decision in international court in its favor, but the United States is notoriously unaffected by the rulings of such courts.

Some websites claim now that the whole operation was hatched by the CIA to stop the sale of illegal passports by whatever means necessary.

I am not condoning here the sale of illegal passports. But it is indisputable that the whole situation left Nauru two things it most assuredly is not, in any literal sense – high and dry.

What Now?

As a matter of fact, everything in Nauru is getting less high and less dry. If some scientists’ predictions hold true, sea levels will rise enough in just 50 years to leave the only inhabited parts of Nauru underwater. Only the craggy limestone pillars of topside, Nauru’s national shame, will remain.

At this point, presumably, Nauru would return to a seabird toilet for the next million years.

Australia has, apparently, offered one of its islands off the Great Barrier Reef to Nauru. How likely do you think they are to leap at the chance to leave the land where their ancestors have lived for millennia?

Something’s got to give. And until it does, there they sit, broke and racking up debts. Ninety percent unemployed, 90 percent obese, and on an island 90 percent uninhabitable.

No one is quite sure which 10 percent will vanish first.