Journalist Barbara Dreaver will not easily forget the date of 4 September at the Arriaga Theatre in Bilbao. He was a reporter of the New Zealand TVNZ chain to report on the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru. In the meantime, he interviewed an Afghan refugee who cannot leave the island and was arrested shortly afterwards by the police, who held him prisoner for hours and withdrew permission to work as a journalist. Journalists have to pay $5,800 to be able to work here.

Not long ago it was known that in a closed area of Nauru some of the hundreds of refugees that Australia has been sawn went on hunger strike in their despair; some had even reached the suicide attempt. Refugee support activists tried to put the issue on the agenda of the Pacific Islands Forum, but in vain: refugees cannot be mentioned. Fundamentally, because Nauru, one of the smallest independent countries on the planet, views them as their primary source of income.

The Republic of Nauru, with 21 square kilometres and a population of only 10,000, has captured 1,000 refugees and asylum-seekers in that small promontory who sought refuge in Australia fleeing from remote wars and violence. However, Australia, instead of taking refuge, took them to the islands of Nauru and Manus, this one from Papua New Guinea. In the case of Nauru, there are about 400 prisoners in a fenced area and the liberated people who have passed large cannot leave the island, condemned to survive as they can without work.

According to Amnesty International’s report on this humanitarian crisis, “numerous documents, as well as experts from the United Nations, have demonstrated in this system that Australia’s prisoners and asylum seekers suffer all kinds of ill-treatment.”

One of the main sources of income of the Government of Nauru is the compensation paid by Australia in return for staying at home. But those who manage the prison benefit more than the authorities: “The main private contractor – says Amnesty International – is Broadspectrum, which receives $1.9 billion for a three-year contract. Broadspectrum has been a member of the Spanish multinational Ferrovial since 2016.”

But in Nauru things have not always been that way, the need to become the jailer of a foreign country is something new. There were more prosperous times here. So prosperous that Nauru was one of the richest countries in the world in per capita income. Not long ago. Nauru has gone from being a closed paradise to diving into industrial mining and supposedly getting rich to sink into the hardest post-industrial desert. And all of this in the short space of a hundred years.

The Western sailors who first landed in Nauru in 1798 were surprised by the beauty of the island and its inhabitants: They called it Pleasant Island, a nice island. By the end of the 19th century, it continued to live for hundreds of years before, as shown in the photos of the time. But at first XX.aren for the Pacific Island Company, geologist Albert Ellis observed that in the subsoil of this distant paradise there was phosphate.

Turn paradise into a quarry hole

Pleasant Island soon became a great quarry where phosphate appeared in the sight of Australian and New Zealand companies exploited throughout the 20th century. During this time, Nauru went from being a colony of Germany to being a colony of the British Empire, after Australia.

With the boom in industrial agriculture, the phosphate from Nauru covered the fields and fields of Australia and New Zealand. Although in the best times more than $100 million was moved annually, only 2 per cent of the island's phosphate profits were returned to the nauruars.

British Phosphate Commission was a shadowy organization that managed the business until 1968. That same year, Nauru's independence was achieved. The new president, Hammer DeRoburt, nationalized phosphate, creating for his management the company Nauru Phosphate Corporation. The large quarry continued to pierce the ground and Nauru became one of the richest countries in the world in terms of per capita income.

Some of the benefits of phosphate went to an investment fund and the other part to finance an ever quieter life for citizens. Everything was free for the nauruarras, no tax. In the absence of arable land, agriculture was finite. The fishermen left their jobs. For the quarries, the workers of the neighboring islands were brought in. Nauruarras could fly to Hawaii, Fiji or even Singapore. The most modern cars were imported... By bike to an island that only needs one morning to visit!

Nauru phosphates had been depleted by the year 2000, eliminating 100 million tonnes of fertilizers from 1921. In the absence of a salary, foreign workers fled. In the meantime, the Government sought an economic alternative, particularly through the accumulation of phosphate funds. They made strange investments abroad, big planes, skyscrapers and stories that soon became a failure.

The island also became a tax haven, to the point of linking it to the mafia and several money laundering scandals. Having exhausted the agricultural possibilities, as if trying to favor the emergency, Australia offered them to be jailers of the immigrants he rejects. The failure of a state.

80% of the Earth's surface, emboldened by phosphate hunting, is a dry rock in the middle of the ocean. Of the many trees and plants of yesteryear there is little left. Without agricultural land and forgetting how the garden was made by those who wanted to do so. As unemployment exceeds 80%, some nauruarras have re-exploded.

On a journey from the jungle to modernity and then to post-industrial hell, the people of Nauru have lost peace, nature, way of life, work, culture, language... and health. The life expectancy of men is 60 years, that of women is 68 years. 70% of the population suffers from obesity, 40% have diabetes.

Food has changed radically: As in many other colonized islands in the Pacific, for a long time everything has been in Spam Nauru kitchens, imported food from far away, industrial, fat and packaged. Junk food for low cost people on an island as dry as the squeezed lemon juice bark.