FOUR asylum-seekers rejected by Australia were welcomed into Cambodia yesterday from the Pacific island of Nauru.

Cambodia agreed to accept the four under a four-year agreement worth AU$40 million (£20 m) that it struck with Australia last year to resettle asylum-seekers held in the Australian-run detention center in Nauru.

Australian officials had said that they were working with UN agency the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and other groups in Cambodia to provide the four — two Iranian men, an Iranian woman and a Rohingya man from Myanmar — with housing, jobs, transport and education.

Phnom Penh sent officials to Nauru to meet the four and to make sure their moves were voluntary.

After arrival, the four were taken to temporary accommodation in the capital.

IOM said it would begin providing “essential support,” including language training, cultural orientation and health and job services.

Many of the 677 asylum-seekers in the Nauru detention centre — a virtual concentration camp of tents and prefabricated cabins — have been there for almost two years.

The tiny and impoverished Micronesian nation of 10,000 inhabitants allowed Australia to operate the detention centre on its territory from 2001 to 2008 and again since 2012 in return for aid and investment.

But Australia’s conservative government has faced criticism over the cost of the agreement with Cambodia, which has so far attracted little interest from refugees on Nauru.

Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton claimed that his country’s policies of turning back asylum-seeker boats to Indonesia and refusing to resettle refugees who arrive by boat had succeeded in discouraging migrants.

Meanwhile, Myanmar’s Foreign Affairs Minister Wunna Maung Lwin said yesterday that the thousands of Rohingya people who have left the country were not refugees but economic migrants.

“It is not true that the migrants from Myanmar fled because of discrimination or persecution in Myanmar,” he said. “They are just the victims of human smugglers.”

On Wednesday authorities rescued 730 people from trafficking boats off the coast of Rakhine state, home to around a million Rohingya people.