Nauru

Nauru, officially the Republic of Naoero, is an island country and microstate in the South Pacific Ocean in the Micronesia subregion of Oceania, with Yaren as its de facto capital and its nearest neighbor, Banaba, about 300 kilometers to the east. At only 21 square kilometers, Nauru is the third-smallest country in the world and the smallest member state of the Commonwealth of Nations, with a population of about 12,000, the world's third-smallest. First settled by Micronesians around 1000 BCE, Nauru was annexed by the German Empire in the late nineteenth century, occupied by Australia during the First World War, administered as a League of Nations mandate, occupied by Japan during the Second World War, and became a United Nations trust territory before gaining independence from Australia in 1968; since 2001 it has periodically hosted the Nauru Regional Processing Centre, a controversial offshore Australian immigration detention facility, in exchange for Australian aid, leading some to describe Nauru as an Australian client state. Its interior was profitably but destructively strip-mined for phosphate for about a century starting in 1900; the reserves were exhausted in the 1990s, mismanagement of the mining wealth caused serious financial trouble through the 2000s, and the economy gradually recovered in the 2010s.