The New York Times

ASMARA, Eritrea -- There are many more war memorials in the world than there have been wars, but almost certainly none is quite like the one here in the capital of Eritrea: a sculpture of two giant sandals.

The footwear, made of sheet metal and extending more than 20 feet long, lies in a small park here, a place known as Shida Square.

One sandal rests casually atop the other, as if they have been flipped off someone's outsized feet.

The memorial lacks a sign explaining the significance of "shida," which is the Arabic word for sandals. But every last Eritrean knows what it means.

The shida is far more than a cheap, plastic sandal in the Eritrean psyche. It is the footwear that Eritrean nationalists have worn since the 1960s in their fight to attain an independent country.

A small country in the Horn of Africa, Eritrea has known far more war than peace over the last few decades. It has been at various times an Italian colony, a British protectorate and an Ethiopian province. The country began ruling itself in 1991.

Most recently, the plastic sandals appeared on the feet of fighters in 1998 when Eritrea began a two-year war with neighboring Ethiopia. They had many benefits in the sweltering heat of the rugged border region. They were inexpensive and allowed air to circulate around the feet.

A shida-making machine was set up near the front. When one of the straps on a shida breaks, it can be quickly fixed with a small flame by melting it back together again.

"It's what all our fighters wore," said Girma Asmeron, who is Eritrea's ambassador to the United States and has a pair himself. "If someone saw you in those shoes, they knew you were a fighter. We didn't have uniforms. That was our uniform, and it become a symbol of our independence."

The sculpture was the idea of Eritros Abraham, an electrical engineer by training who returned to Eritrea in 1991 from 20 years of exile in the United States.

"You usually think of statues, not shoes, when you think of a memorial," he said. "This is certainly unusual, but to us it makes sense."