Women played a central role in Eritrea's 30-year war for independence from Ethiopia, which annexed the former Italian colony in the 1960s, but their post-independence participation in public life presents a mixed record. By the nationalist victory in 1991, they made up nearly a third of the 95,000 – strong Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) and 13 percent of the frontline fighters in what had been the longest-running conflict in modern African history – a conflict characterized by remarka…