But for Delga's 20,000 Christians, facing their twelfth consecutive week of sectarian oppression, such arguments were academic.
In a landscape strewn with the failed hopes of the Arab spring, it is admired by Sunnis who are angered by sectarian oppression in Iraq and Syria and who fear Iran and Shia allies such as Hezbollah.
The basic reasoning behind that is if Iraq fragments, it's just going be a long, brutal bout of ethnic cleansing, sectarian oppression, and the other many joys that made the former Yugoslavia such a delightful place in the 1990s.
"The only thing that unites Christians and Muslims in Nigeria [where thousands of people have been killed in sectarian conflict] is the oppression of gay people," Mr Onwuchekwa said.
For him, the Iranians of 1905 were "a people who had for centuries borne the yoke of oppression and autocracy, knowing nothing except sectarian conflict, pointless Moharram and Safar ceremonies and such, being so unfamiliar with the meaning of nation and country and so on, and having had no freedom to discuss their sufferings".
My critical miscalculation was minimizing the sectarian nature of the Burmese military's longstanding oppression, and ongoing persecution of ethnic and religious minorities – including but not limited to the Rohingya – on account of their identity.
"It would stir hostility to the revolution and make it fail, diverting its goal from helping the oppressed to stirring up sectarian conflict between the sons of our one people, quite apart from the fact that everybody knows that most of the Iraqi people in the south reject Maliki and his gang, and suffer his oppression like the rest of us".
Today, many Iraqis feel they are on the road back to the dark days of 2006 and '07, the peak of sectarian militia massacres by Shiites ascendant after years of oppression under Saddam Hussein, and by minority Sunnis disempowered by his fall.
The protests were a show of Shiite solidarity against the Sunni ruling class of Bahrain with echoes of Iraq's own sectarian history – the American invasion here upended decades of oppression by a Sunni government over an impoverished Shiite majority – but the demonstrations were also weighted with deeper meaning for Iraq's own current politics.
"Peaceful protest... were met with oppression and carnage," he says, and "many retreated to their sectarian identities".
"Oppression, corruption and regional involvement (namely Iran) which enhanced the sectarian feelings and reaction, influenced by the Arab Spring movement encouraged the Syrian people to dash to streets calling for freedom and the collapse of Assad's dictatorship," he said.
