Hammer DeRoburt
Hammer DeRoburt led an island of eight thousand people to independence and briefly to one of the highest incomes per head in the world, on bird droppings. Nauru is twenty-one square kilometres in the central Pacific, and almost all of its interior was phosphate rock - seabird guano compressed over millennia into the purest fertiliser deposit anywhere. Germany, then Britain, Australia and New Zealand jointly, mined it from 1907 and paid the islanders a royalty that was a small fraction of its value. He had been deported to Japanese-occupied Truk during the war with most of the population, and returned as a teacher and then as head chief. The negotiations he led before independence in 1968 turned on two questions: who owned the phosphate, and who would pay to rehabilitate land that mining had reduced to bare limestone pinnacles across four-fifths of the island. He got the mine. Nauru bought the operation outright in 1970 and the revenue per citizen briefly rivalled anywhere on earth, funding a trust meant to outlive the deposit. He did not get the damage paid for, and pursued it: Nauru sued Australia at the International Court of Justice in 1989 over the pre-independence years, the court found it had jurisdiction in 1992, and Australia settled for a substantial sum in 1993 without admitting liability. It is one of very few cases in which a former colony recovered money for environmental destruction. The trust was then lost to bad investments and worse advice, the phosphate ran down, and Nauru turned to offshore banking and to hosting an Australian detention centre for asylum seekers. He died in 1992, months before the settlement.
- Lived: 1922 CE – 1992 CE
- Nationality: Nauruan
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
