Up to 200 people were massacred in Bentalha, on the outskirts of Algiers, early yesterday. The victims - as usual mostly women and children - were hacked to death with axes or burned in their homes.

And as usual, the government security forces who patrol the region and who maintain a large gendarmerie barracks in the dusty slum of nearby Baraki did nothing to stop the slaughter. Algerians are asking why, and they are wondering how the rest of the world can watch helplessly while their country becomes a byword for horror. The death count in the Algerian civil war was arbitrarily stopped at 60,000 a year ago; diplomats say even 100,000 is a conservative figure.

Just over three weeks ago, up to 300 people were massacred at Rais, just a few kilometres outside the capital. The massacre early yesterday has shown, if proof were needed, that the killing by roving bands is moving inexorably towards the centre of Algiers itself, where residents until now feared car bombs and assassination, but not the mass butchery inflicted upon their compatriots first in the distant hamlets of the Mitijda plain, and now in the poverty belt around the city.

In both the Rais and Bentalha massacres, the government broke its rule of silence only to dispute the figures reported by western wire agencies. At Rais on August 29th, the government insisted "only" 98 people were killed, despite numerous eye-witness accounts putting the toll at about 300.

Likewise, escapers from Bentalha yesterday estimated the number of dead at between 180 and 200. The Algerian government wire agency APS issued an indignant statement saying that "only" 85 had been murdered. That President Liamine Zeroual's government could seek to mitigate the gravity of the worst massacres in 5 1/2 years of civil war by claiming "only" a lesser number of people had died shows how truly desperate the situation is.

With the government failing to fulfil its most basic mandate to protect its citizens, residents of the capital are arming themselves with crowbars, axes and guns. Vigilante groups prevent anyone from outside the neighbourhood from parking, for fear he may be driving a car bomb.

Women are so afraid to go to open-air markets, where bombs are often planted, that they do without fresh fruit and vegetables. The government's inane pronouncements further discourage a population that has reached the limits of endurance. Algeria faces only "residual terrorism", the Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Ouyahia, repeated on television for the umpteenth time on Sunday.

On an official visit to the Netherlands on September 8th, the Foreign Minister, Mr Ahmed Attaf, said the situation was "completely under control" and that the "terrorists" had lost all hope of overthrowing the government: scant comfort for the victims of Rais and Bentalha.

The banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) - whose December 1991 election victory was cancelled by the Algerian army - claims that government troops are carrying out the massacres. By maintaining an atmosphere of terror, the arguments go, the killings enable Mr Zeroual's regime to stay in power.

After more than 60 people were murdered at Beni Messous, on the outskirts of Algiers, on September 5th, the Algerian newspaper El Watan quoted escapers saying they had alerted security forces that the massacre was taking place - the butchery often continues for four or five hours - but that officers refused to budge. The author of the article was arrested.

In the absence of credible explanations by the government, more Algerians are beginning to believe the FIS allegations. "People are asking how 100 or 200 people can have their throats slashed when there are barracks nearby," Mr Hakim Addad, the leader of RAJ, an antiwar youth group, said after yesterday's massacre.

Government troops, who are suffering high, unreported casualties, may be too frightened to confront the bands of killers at night, in poor neighbourhoods or villages which tend to be hostile to the authorities. The police and gendarmerie stopped responding to appeals for help several years ago, when the rebels used fake alerts to prepare ambushes. The extremists often lay mines on the perimeter of the areas where they go methodically from house to house, killing inhabitants.

That security forces may be too cowardly to intervene does not speak highly of them, but that is not the same as actually carrying out the massacres.

Soldiers have attacked villages believed to be hide-outs for the rebels, but there has been no evidence of security forces beheading, slashing throats and disembowelling, the signature methods of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). I recently asked a journalist in Algiers whether the government could be participating in the massacres. "I have asked every opposition group to give me the name of one village, one date, where the government massacred," he said. "They weren't able to do it."

The FIS, which in the past applauded the assassination of Algerian secular intellectuals, now tries to portray itself as the righteous party in the Algerian civil war. The massacres are committed by the GIA, it says, and the GIA, the FIS claims, is a creation of the Algerian Securite Militaire. It is true that military intelligence has infiltrated fundamentalist movements, and that the fundamentalists have to some degree infiltrated the military.

But to claim, as the FIS does, that GIA leaders Mr Djamal Zitouni - responsible for murdering seven French Trappist monks - and his successor Mr Antar Zouabri work for Military Security stretches credibility. In other words, exiled FIS leaders would have us believe, the government created and maintains its principal opponent in the civil war, the GIA.

Mr Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister, broke Paris's usual reserve on the Algerian civil war on September 11th, saying that "the new outbreak of violence in Algeria seems to be the response of Islamists opposed to any compromise with the Algerian government".

Massacres like the one at Rais were not "blind violence", he said, but a way of "opposing any beginning of dialogue between the Algerian government and certain legalist Islamists which is bearing fruit". Mr Vedrine referred to the liberation of the FIS leader Sheikh Abassi Madani in July. What Mr Vedrine did not say is that it suits "eradicators" in the military, as well as among the fundamentalists, for the massacres to continue.

A three-day seminar on "contemporary forms of violence and the culture of peace" was concluded at the Aurassi Hotel in Algiers on Monday, just hours before the Bentalha massacre started.

The meeting was organised by the Algerian government's official human rights group. The situation in Algeria was never mentioned. On Monday morning, about 100 women whose male relatives had disappeared managed to enter the hotel. The authorities claim the men are fighting with the rebels; the women claim they were kidnapped by security forces. "There are no disappeared," a policeman shouted at the women. "There are only terrorists."

"Tell us where our children are," a woman screamed back. "If they are dead, tell us. We are Algerian." the women were not allowed to enter the conference room.