Subcommandante Marcos has become a role model for many insurgent leaders around the world. His professional media management, especially, is much admired, not only by intellectuals but also by the rank and file of ethno-nationalist movements. I one day went into a coffee shop in Kreuzberg where a group of men from northern Iraq sat together. They were smoking and chatting, glancing through the misted window onto the snowy streets of Berlin and from time to time at the television news of MED-TV, a Kurdish satellite television programme produced in Belgium. When Marcos appeared on the screen, giving a speech on the crowded main square of the capital, they discussed his performance, compared it to previous announcements and ended up wondering why the Kurdish uprising led by Mazud Barzani and Jalal Talabani had not recently received a comparable coverage in international news.

And indeed, northern Iraq used to be at the centre of international media attention after the end of the second Gulf war, when the Allied forces installed a zone of protection there. The Kurdish guerrilla forces had embarked on a project of state-building amidst an atmosphere of nationalist euphoria. A Kurdish army had been formed out of the different guerrilla forces, a government set up with ministries and cabinet meetings, and customs taken at the borders; even urban professionals had started to wear the Kurdish ‘national’ costume.