The demonstrators' invocation of hogra was underlined by the slow official reaction to the events in Kabylia. When President Abdelaziz Bouteflika finally spoke, it was a full week after the start of the riots. He promised a fair and transparent investigation, and declared that the issue of Berber language would be addressed in a forthcoming revision of the constitution. Bouteflika also accused unnamed forces inside and outside the country of trying to sow discord among Algerians and warned that they would be unmasked. Apart from the commission of inquiry, there was nothing concrete in the presidential address.
Algerian observers point out the dismal government record with past commissions of inquiry.
The region has a history of agitation against the central government dating back to the 1960s, soon after Algeria became independent from France. In the 1980s, young Kabyles led a movement for official recognition of the Berber language and culture which drew a repressive regime reaction lasting for many years. Every year the region celebrates this occasion with marches in which demonstrators chant anti-regime slogans and call for the elevation of the Berber language, Tamazight, to the status of an official and national language on a par with Arabic. Although most Algerians are descended from the Berbers, the original inhabitants of North Africa, agitation for recognition of Berber culture has been mainly a Kabyle affair. But it is the Kabyles, living close to the capital and strongly represented in the urban population and in the emigre community in France as well as in their densely settled mountains, who have given rise to an active Berberist movement that contests the regime for imposing an Arab identity on what it argues is essentially a Berber country.