Bernard Dowiyogo

President of Nauru

Bernard Dowiyogo, politician: born Nauru 14 February 1946; President of Nauru 1976-78, 1989-1995, 1996-99, 2000-01, 2003; married (four children); died Washington, DC 9 March 2003.

Picture a tiny coralline equatorial island. Of its 12,000 people, about 60 per cent are indigenous Micronesians. Only 12 miles in circumference, this speck of land is an independent republic. Its official correspondence notepaper helpfully says "Central Pacific" in case you have not heard of it and do not know where it is.

Such is Nauru, whose people were once said to be second only to those of Kuwait in per capita annual income. Phosphates, not oil, are the key to its history and were the source of its wealth. The trappings of phosphate mining – and the stark moonscape plateau that is its consequence – were about all there seemed to be when I first flew in. Nauruan domestic life clung to the coastal periphery with rusting motor cars flanking new ones in the garden of seemingly every house.

Hammer DeRoburt became the first president of Nauru on independence in 1968. Bernard Dowiyogo was his lifelong rival. While DeRoburt was 24 years older, they followed each other in and out of presidential office until DeRoburt's death in 1992.

Nauru had been annexed by Germany in 1888. It surrendered to Australian forces in 1914 and remained administered by Australia, first under a League of Nations mandate and from 1947 under a UN trusteeship agreement in which Britain and New Zealand also participated. The 1940s war in the Pacific resulted in the devastation of the island. More than half the population was forcibly deported by the Japanese to the island of Truk. Nauru and its phosphate industry were all but destroyed by sustained bombing thereafter. Now, its resource demise is at hand.

Dowiyogo first became an elected member of Nauru's 18-member parliament in 1973. He served as President for seven terms; the first in 1976, the longest for six years from 1989 to 1995, the shortest for 15 days in 1996. In none of them did he seem able or willing to stem the financial excesses of the DeRoburt years in office; nor the profligacy which marked the relentless decline in Nauru's phosphate fortunes.

Eccentric DeRoburt decisions came to haunt Dowiyogo's presidencies: the purchase of underemployed ships and the creation of a loss-leader airline, Air Nauru, are examples. The airline flew to and from some obscure destinations, at times with few or no passengers other than the President and his staff; while its reputation for delayed payments of airport accounts immobilised aircraft and reduced passenger loadings still more.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Dowiyogo earned the disapproval of France for his sharp criticism of and opposition to French nuclear tests in Tahiti. Many South Pacific islanders, who feared for their safety, applauded his outspoken courage and pragmatism. For 27 years, Dowiyogo navigated the unpredictably complex Nauruan political waters: sometimes in presidential office, sometimes out of it. When he returned to power on 8 January 2003, it was the third time that Nauru had changed presidents in the same month.

In 2001, Nauru accepted a bizarre financial lifeline from Australia: in return for A$20m (about £7m) a year, the government agreed to admit and house hundreds of asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere who had been intercepted at sea and refused entry to Australia. The phosphate wasteland of equatorial Nauru can hardly be what was in mind when they set off to the Promised Land.

Kenneth Bain