Maputo — Mozambique has been invaded by China, the former rebel movement Renamo alleged on Tuesday.

This remarkable claim was made by the Renamo members of the Defence and Public Order Commission of the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, and is contained in the opinion from the commission given during the debate on the government plan and budget for 2005.

One of the reason Renamo commission members gave for rejecting the 2005 plan was that it said nothing about "the silent invasion by citizens of the People's Republic of China, many thousands of whom are arriving in the country, many illegally, others under cover of building or timber companies linked to figures in Frelimo".

Renamo went on to claim that many of the Chinese workers are convicts "who are serving their sentences in Mozambique, usually in building companies, on condition that they do not go back to China after their sentence is over, and so they remain definitively in our country".

But it is not only the Chinese who, in Renamo's fevered vision, are overrunning the country. The same Renamo complaint spoke of "a migratory flow from the Great Lakes, from the east coast of the continent (but since Mozambique itself is on the east coast, this may be misprint for west coast) and from Pakistan".

This influx "is growing every day, and is responsible for the increase in crime, the consumption of drugs and the falsification of currency, under the passive gaze of the immigration and police authorities, ravaged by apathy and corruption".

So we are being swamped by outsiders, and crime and drugs are the fault of evil foreigners. Thus Renamo proves how the discourse of the far right is uncannily the same, all over the world.

Even Cuba poses a threat in Renamo's paranoid eyes. Renamo objects that the number of Cuban workers sent to Mozambique (mostly in the health and education services) this year under bilateral cooperation agreements is set to double.

"It is publicly known that 50 per cent of their wages are deducted and sent to sustain an internationally condemned government", thundered Renamo. Renamo itself, of course, has plenty of first hand experience of governments that really were internationally condemned - it was created by one, the Smith regime in what was then Rhodesia, and later sustained by another, the apartheid regime of South Africa.