The small sanctuary of Nauru

"Are they coming here?" asked the receptionist at the Hotel Menen in Nauru, sounding breathless with excitement. "We have many rooms free at the moment."

The impending arrival of 310 asylum-seekers has sent a frisson through Nauru, a tiny speck in the South Pacific.

Visitors are a rare commodity, because Nauru has no tourist attractions and just one export: bird droppings.

For the island's 12,000 people, the prospect of refugees from Afghanistan is positively exotic.

Quite what the Afghans will make of Nauru, a polluted lunar landscape ravaged by a century of phosphate mining, is anyone's guess.

When they fled a repressive regime, desperate for a better future, they could scarcely have predicted what lay in store.

Shipwreck on the high seas. Salvation by kindly Norwegians. The arrival of SAS commandos in full combat gear. Utter rejection by Australia, the country that embodied their aspirations, and which has treated them like pariahs.

Now, after a week languishing aboard the Norwegian freighter MS Tampa in the Indian Ocean, with the Australian territory of Christmas Island shimmering tantalisingly on the horizon, the asylum-seekers are about to embark on yet another leg of their odyssey.

Pending the result of court action in Melbourne, they are to be shipped to Papua New Guinea by an Australian Navy troop carrier and then flown to Nauru or – in the case of 150 of them – to New Zealand.

Once their claims have been processed, those deemed genuine will be resettled by several nations including Australia, Norway and New Zealand.

But not yet, because lawyers for the asylum-seekers have secured a Federal Court injunction that prevents them from being removed until the court has ruled on whether they should be allowed to land in Australia.

The legal action is likely to delay their transfer to the HMAS Manoora, an amphibious troop ship, by several days. An appeal is expected if the ruling is against the government.

The decision to send most of the Tampa's occupants to Nauru was condemned by the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who said that they would be better off on Christmas Island, and by Norway, whose Foreign Minister, Thorbjoern Jagland, called it inhumane.

There was further embarrassment for Australia yesterday when the British tycoon Richard Branson, visiting Australia to launch a new route for his low-cost airline, Virgin Blue, offered to fly a plane to Christmas Island to pick up the asylum-seekers.

The offer was declined, through gritted teeth, by the Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer.

The Afghans will spend up to six months on Nauru, but not at the Hotel Menen, one of its two hotels. Australian officials plan to set up a tent city to accommodate them.

Nauru is described by Lonely Planet's guidebook as "a wasteland of mind-boggling proportions".

With most of the island uninhabitable because of environmental devastation, the population clings to a narrow coastal strip.

Electricity is rationed to two hours a day and drinking water is imported from Australia. Nauru's single-plane airline was recently grounded as unsafe. Nauruans also have famously poor health, with high rates of heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

The island's rich phosphate deposits, extracted from guano, or fossilised bird droppings, once gave Nauruans the world's second highest per capita income. But they invested their money unwisely, their industry is in sharp decline and the country – also notorious as an international money-laundering centre – is close to bankruptcy.

Like many South Pacific nations, Nauru is also being engulfed by rising tides as a result of global warming. Some Australians speculated yesterday that the arrival of 300 extra souls would make the island disappear beneath the waves.

- INDEPENDENT