Defiant Hawaiian unfurls the flag of freedom

[T_i_B]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/07/15/whawaii15.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/07/15/ixnews.html

Here, among banana and coconut trees and blood red hibiscus, 100 people live a life in contemptuous rejection of the American dream.

"This is not America," Mr Kanahele said. "That is 3,000 miles away." He has some grounds for complaint. In 1893, Queen Lydia Liliuokalani was deposed in a coup organised by Stanford Dole, an American pineapple magnate, and supported by US marines. Five years later the islands were annexed.

On the coup's anniversary in 1993, America formally apologised "for the overthrow of the kingdom of Hawaii … and the deprivation of the rights of native Hawaiians to self-determination". Mr Kanahele said that was an admission that the US was illegally occupying Hawaii.

But nurturing a grievance is one thing; overturning decades of history is another. Asked whether Hawaii really could recover its independence, Mr Kanahele affected a breezy confidence: "Oh yeah," he said. "It is inevitable; it could happen within three to five years." At the moment, it seems a remote dream. America treasures its strategic Pacific island state and the hard-line independence movement probably numbers only a few thousand.