The UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, has persuaded Algeria's stubborn generals to accept a visit from the former Portuguese president, Mr Mario Soares, and political figures from India, Jordan, the US, France and Kenya.
Unlike previous delegations, the six-strong UN team have refused to stay in a government guest house and are spending two weeks rather than a night or two in Algeria. They have met the real source of power, the chief of staff of the armed forces, Gen Mohamed Lamari, as well as human rights lawyers and opponents of the regime, such as journalist Salima Ghezali. They even made an unprecedented stop at the notorious Serkadji prison.
But after five years of UN requests, Algeria still refuses to allow specially trained UN rapporteurs on torture and summary execution to enter the country. And the Foreign Minister, Mr Ahmed Attaf, warned Mr Annan in a letter that the delegation "will have no investigative mandate nor a mandate to establish facts". The final report "will lead to no form of follow-up". The Algiers press has been debating whether the acceptance of the UN delegation shows the country has nothing to hide, or whether, on the contrary, it is an affront to Algeria's dignity, an international commission of inquiry disguised as a simple "information mission".
In their heavily protected motorcade, the delegation are unlikely to encounter what Djamila saw on her way to work four days ago. "At first my colleague and I thought he was sleeping by the roadside," she told me on the phone from Algiers. "Then we saw the blood on his neck, so much blood. He was a young man - they are usually young men - and he'd had his throat slashed."
Two hours later, the body was gone. Like most deaths in Algeria, it was never reported.
After 6 1/2 years of civil war, a certain fatalism has set in. Two people were killed by bombs buried under the sand on Algiers beaches on July 17th. But with temperatures in the high 30s and nowhere else to go, the beaches are still packed. Djamila prefers Sidi Ferruch; it costs 150 dinars, but the men searching bags and coolers at the entry give her a sense of security. She goes on Fridays, the Algerian equivalent of Sunday.
"There are bearded men with their wives in hidjab [Islamic covering]. The women splash in the water with their veils clinging to them, while their husbands ogle girls in bikinis. It's like Saudi Arabia until around noon, when the religious ones go to the mosque. Then the chi-chis [westernised middle classes] take over."
War profiteers are getting rich. An unscrupulous distributor sold contaminated meat in the north-eastern city of Constantine, where 17 people have died of botulism and dozens more are hospitalised. Also in Constantine, Prof Ali Ben Saad, a left-wing, anti-fundamentalist university professor, was sentenced to death in absentia for "belonging to a terrorist group" while he was travelling in Europe. His real sin, it now appears, was to have written an article criticising the presidential adviser, Gen Mohammed Betchine.
Algerian journalists have just staged a successful 20-day hunger strike in protest at government plans to move them from "safe" protected housing to the more dangerous area of Tipasa. Now the "children of the martyrs" (of the 1958-1962 War of Independence) are staging their own public fast - one of them is in a coma - because they too want safe lodging. The government cannot even pay state pensions, and to distract attention from Algeria's deeper problems, the prime minister is expected to resign soon.
The regime has just forbidden 1,300 school children from spending holidays in France, where they were invited by humanitarian groups. As usual in Algeria, there are several explanations. Originally, the children were supposed to have been massacre survivors, but well-connected Algerians were taking advantage of the scheme to send their own children, one version says.
In fact, a year-old decree bans Algerian children who have been "victims of terrorism" from travelling abroad - as apparently some children were questioned about what they had witnessed and about who was carrying out the massacres. A third reason, the one put forward by the government, is that Algerian children should not be subjected to "values that are not our own".
Algeria's perennial identity crisis between east and west affects even the ruling generals: the "Arabo-Islamist current" has the upper hand at the moment. Hence the recent law banning public use of any language other than Arabic and the refusal to allow Algerian children to holiday in France.
The Algerian Minister of Solidarity went on television to explain the decision. Algerian children had returned from earlier holidays saying "Vive la France", she said. Henceforward they would sing the Algerian national anthem.
The same insularism lies behind the lawsuit for defamation filed by Ms Oum Saad against the Agence France Presse and its Algiers photographer, Hocine. Last September, after the massacre of more than 200 people at Bentalha, Hocine photographed the grieving woman outside a nearby hospital. The beautiful and tragic picture was published on front pages around the world and won the World Press photographic award.
Yet the Algerian government seems to believe that if photographs were not taken and articles were not written, their country's catastrophe would not be taking place. In an obvious attempt to intimidate the wire agency, the government-owned newspaper Horizons launched a campaign against Hocine's photograph, claiming it was fake. El Watan newspaper put a stop to that by publishing other photographs of the same scene taken by its photographer from further away.
Ms Saad then appeared on Algerian television saying she had not lost her eight children in the massacre, but her brother and his family. She denounced "a certain press" whom she accused of "feeding on the suffering of Algerians".
Not by coincidence, Ms Saad's lawyer is also the lawyer for Horizons. He blames AFP for the fact that Ms Saad became known as "The Madonna of Bentalha" - a phrase never used by the agency. She is a Muslim, he argues; to call her by the Christian term "Madonna" is an insult.