Australia's Refugee Archipelago.(Brief Article)

The scores of Afghan refugees who landed on Nauru in mid-September were dazed for good reason. They had spent a month at sea, and they had expected their journey to end on the vast shores of Australia. Instead they found themselves dumped onto a fly-speck Pacific atoll and herded into a hastily built detention camp called Topside. "Most of them probably hadn't seen the ocean until they started on their epic journeys," says Marissa Bandharangshi, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "And they certainly would never have heard of Nauru."

Topside is part of Australian Prime Minister John Howard's "Pacific solution" --a plan to create a refugee archipelago of detention centers strung out across the South Pacific. The hope is that asylum seekers-- mostly Iraqis and Afghans who pay as much as $4,000 per passage on leaky, overcrowded boats leaving from Indonesia--will stay home if they know they will be diverted to places like Nauru. The policy has already won Howard political points at home. But refugee advocates and, increasingly, Pacific nations themselves are blasting Canberra's new closed-door policy as selfish and xenophobic. Says Margaret Piper, executive director of the Sydney-based Refugee Council of Australia: "A number of things the current government has done cannot be described in any way other than racist."

The flow of asylum-seekers from the Middle East and South Asia to Australia has picked up considerably in the last few years. Since mid- 1999 about 9,000 "boat people" have landed safely on Australia's isolated northwest coast, often via outlying territories like Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island. Hundreds of others have died en route, among them the approximately 370 people who drowned after their overloaded boat sank in the Java Sea on Oct. 19. Until recently Canberra had tried to deter such crossings by bolstering naval patrols near Indonesia and shuttling refugees into harsh camps--virtual prisons--in the Outback.

Australia toughened its antirefugee stance in August, after its Navy prevented a Norwegian freighter full of refugees plucked from a sinking Indonesian ferry from reaching shore. Those asylum seekers were ultimately diverted to Nauru and New Zealand. Canberra quickly removed both Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef from its "immigration zone," thus denying foreigners landing there the right to make asylum claims in liberal Australian courts. In mid-October Canberra began scouring the South Pacific for more allies willing to take in asylum seekers. "We are not looking to divert the problem," says a spokesperson for Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock. "Our intention is to stop the trade, and overseas centers are part of the strategy."

For Australia's smaller neighbors, that translates into enticing offers of aid. Nauru will receive about $9 million in assistance for accommodating ...