Mysterious references were found to a debootstrap RPM built for Fedora that should also work on CentOS5.4. Google searches are helpful in finding working links though – it pulled up download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/debootstrap-1.0.10-1.fc10.noarch.rpm. Which seems to work – the fc11 and fc12 version have weird dependencies which CentOS couldn’t handle. (As an aside, CentOS seems to be incredibly poor in terms of software that seems to work with it. It can’t seem to find any program which I search for. I think I’ll need to find additional repos for it.)
Anyway, installing debootstrap once the rpm was found was simple – rpm -ivh debootstrap-etc, done.