Kefagn Patriotic Front (KPF) is a political faction in Ethiopia. KPF emerged out of a group of soldiers in the army of the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam who refused to serve in the Eritrean war.
Originally known simply as "Kefagn", KPF evolved from the created to combat the incursions of the Tigray People's Liberation Front into Gondar Province. With the fall of the Mengistu regime this group declined in strength but was not eliminated. John Young recounts that in May 1993 he encountered government soldiers on the western shores of Lake Tana who had been wounded in clashes with dissidents in the area. He was told that these rebels were led by General Haile Meles, a former Derg official.
Later in 1993, General Haile was wounded, and evacuated to Sudan, where government officials protected him and refused Ethiopian demands for his extradition. He continued to be a source of controversy in Sudanese–Ethiopian relations until he was granted asylum in New Zealand in late 1999. By the time he left Sudan, the KPF was in disarray, although the transfer of most of the area west of Lake Tana to the Benishangul-Gumuz Region, served to reactivate the group. Since then the Kefagn, which had since renamed itself as the Kefagn Patriotic Front, has received some assistance from the Sudan Armed Forces.
In 1996 the majority of the KPF, based amongst guerrillas in Sudan and Ethiopia, joined the Ethiopian Unity Front. The minority, based in the USA, stayed out of EUF.
Famous quotes containing the words patriotic and/or front:
“[Rutherford B. Hayes] was a patriotic citizen, a lover of the flag and of our free institutions, an industrious and conscientious civil officer, a soldier of dauntless courage, a loyal comrade and friend, a sympathetic and helpful neighbor, and the honored head of a happy Christian home. He has steadily grown in the public esteem, and the impartial historian will not fail to recognize the conscientiousness, the manliness, and the courage that so strongly characterized his whole public career.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it—and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.”
—Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)