Demand for Action have published the position paper steering the EU Conference on Assyrians in Nineveh hosted by Lars Adaktusson MEP. Now that the dust has settled, there have been a few great takes of it from Mardean Isaac and Elmer Abbo.

Upon digesting it myself and doing a document comparison between what I had leaked recently and this new paper published for public viewing, its safe to assume that the boycott adopted by the political parties and groups made an impact— but only in a superficial sense. This has already been detected and expanded upon by the two critiques mentioned above.

It is clear that the organizers, and more importantly the unnamed author of the document, started feeling the pressure brought about by some of the biggest Assyrian parties and groups expressing their concerns. Couple this with growing public outrage across all sections of the global Assyrian community which compelled Mr Adaktusson to issue a statement trying to rebuff criticism and reassure onlookers, we are left with a document which, upon first glance, reflects the will of those parties not in attendance, but contains subtle political language to the contrary. This kind of last minute finessing was an attempt to rescue the event by the organizers, who appear to have assigned one author for the first paper and a second, more dexterous author for a final draft.

These subtleties can unfortunately be mistaken for meaningful concessions given a casual read-over of the new text (prompting a few “ah-ha! Are you satisfied now?” kind of responses), or worse, as original positions by the rather strange people with confirmation bias who were desperate to defend the event and those involved from the beginning.

As a guide, the document comparison includes:

Additions in blue/underlined .

. Deletions in blue/strikethrough .

. Rearrangements in green .

. Unchanged text in black.

I will mostly use bullet points under section headings to divert you out of the swamp of politico-speak. Let’s look at some of these changes.