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IMPHAL, Dec. 16 -- THE credit for raising the demand for a Kukiland or a Kuki state to be carved out of Manipur, does not belong to the Kukiland State Demand Committee or its armed wing, the Kuki National Organisation. It belongs to an almost unknown Kuki by the name of Hengkhulen Sithlou who had held the nondescript post of headmaster of Motbung High School in the Sadar Hills area of Senapati district. In 1970, he was said to have received the blessings of then Lieutenant-Governor of Manipur D R Kohli.
In the early 1990s, one Nehlun Kipgen trekked to the headquarters of the Kachin Independent Army in Myanmar, armed with a letter signed by the late Dengkhosai Gangte, who had earlier led a contingent of the Mizo National Front to China via Kachin, asking for the arms he had left behind to be handed over to Nelhun.
Nelhun returned to his home in the Kangpokpi area and formed the Kuki National Front. Its primary job then was to meet the threats posed by the NSCN(IM) which had, since June 1992, launched an ethnic-cleansing campaign, wiping out Kukis from their pockets in the Naga areas. But the KNF also had a clear political agenda and that was the creation of a Kukiland, so much so that then chief minister of Manipur R K Dorendra in his last press interview to The Statesman, had reiterated that "there can be no further balkanisation of Manipur and there cannot be a Southern Nagaland or a Kukiland either".
Nehlun was killed in an encounter with the CRPF in the Kangpokpi area and the KNF splintered into factions, with the KNF (Military Council), said to have been under the control of a prominent Manipuri Kuki politician, coming to the fore. Apart from occasional arms snatching from demoralised Manipur Rifles personnel, nothing much was heard about the KNF till it got involved in the ethnic war with a cognate tribe, the Paites, rechristened Zomis, in Churachandpur district.
Around the time the KNF was formed, the KNO also came into being, not in Manipur but in Myanmar. Founded by a...