Hawa Hassan left almost everything behind when she fled the Moyale area on the Ethiopian side of the border. Her house, she said, had been burned. What she carried into Kenya, she told Hafsa Abdiwahab Sheikh of Al Jazeera, was a memory: a 13-year-old girl shot while sitting near a wall. The girl, Hassan said, had not touched a flag. Her account could not be independently verified.

She felt she had to say it: the child had not touched a flag. That tells you what Moyale has become.

The cloth

The quarrel is old. Ethiopia’s Oromia and Somali regional administrations have long disputed who owns the land around Moyale and who governs it. Around October 18 the dispute found a new object, the Somali regional flag, raised over the contested ground. According to Addis Standard, the clashes left death and destruction across seven districts, and as of its October 26 report neither regional government had issued an official statement acknowledging that the conflict existed.

A flag is a piece of cloth. One might reflect that over disputed earth it becomes a deed of ownership, and that the people who argue over whose cloth should fly are seldom the ones who end up sleeping on a bare floor.

The arithmetic of flight

Everyone in Moyale is counting, and no two counts agree. A government-led assessment carried out on October 29 and 30, covering 758 households and involving Kenyan authorities, United Nations agencies, the Kenya Red Cross and other aid groups, estimated that 35,950 people had been displaced as of October 24. About 25,000 were staying with host families and nearly 11,000 in temporary sites.

Then the number grew. Malik Adan, the Kenya Red Cross regional head, said at a meeting that it had climbed from an estimated 36,000 to more than 50,000, counting both those in settlements and those taken in by relatives and strangers. Kenya, UNHCR and the Kenya Red Cross had already begun registering arrivals, allAfrica reported. Kenya’s Prime Cabinet Secretary, Musalia Mudavadi, put the figure lower, saying that “about 40,000 people” had been forced into Kenya, according to Mwakilishi. Police Inspector General Douglas Kanja spoke of about 10,000, but he meant only those in temporary shelters and public buildings. No final total has been confirmed.

Across the border the figure is larger still. The Ethiopian Red Cross Society, citing local authorities, said the conflict had reportedly displaced more than 200,000 people across Moyale and neighbouring areas.

The floor

Behind the numbers are the facts of the road. Hassan said some women gave birth while fleeing. Families arrived without food, cooking pots or bedding. Newborns slept on bare floors. Diarrhoea was spreading, and with the mosquitoes multiplying, families feared malaria.

An assessment backed by the International Organization for Migration and released on November 9 found that 71 percent of households surveyed did not have enough to eat and that 80 percent named food as their most urgent need. More than half of the displaced are children, many of them under five.

Mwasaru Mercy, Kenya’s acting commissioner for refugee affairs, said a multi-agency government team had gone to Moyale and that the Department of Refugee Services was working with local authorities and UNHCR. She could still hear gunfire. The state had been caught empty-handed:

There are no contingency food stocks specifically for this incident because it happened abruptly.

There is no refugee camp, because security must improve before one can be built. The people affected include Ethiopians fleeing the fighting, traders, and Kenyans driven from their homes by stray ammunition, Mercy said. Fatima Mohammed Cole, UNHCR’s representative in Kenya, said many arrivals were women and children, scattered across several locations, six of them sites hosting Ethiopians. She also reported continuing gunfire and appealed for a ceasefire so that families could go home. The UN’s humanitarian office has released more than Sh387 million from its Central Emergency Response Fund for those who crossed, the Daily Nation reported.

Inside Ethiopia, the Red Cross said it had sent emergency shelter and household goods worth about 30 million birr ($182,970) to 1,000 households displaced from Moyale town and the surrounding areas. The shipment included 2,000 tarpaulins, blankets and sleeping mats, along with dignity kits, jerrycans, kitchen sets, soap and solar lamps.

Two towns at one table

The burden falls first on the poor who opened their doors. Abdi Maalim of the Moyale Cross-Border Peace Committee said that some Kenyan families had moved further inland after bullets and heavy weapons landed near their homes, and he called for more border patrols to keep armed groups out. Households that once cooked for five or six now feed 20 or 30.

Moyale lives by trade, and trade has stopped. Maalim said trucks running between Mombasa and Addis Ababa had been stuck near the border for almost two weeks, and that Kenyan trucks were stranded in Ethiopia. Bank closures have choked the flow of birr. Traders report prices up about 20 percent.

Dr Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad, a security analyst, said the clashes had grown beyond a local fight over territory and laid bare ethnic divisions and rivalry between regional administrations. Perceptions of Oromo expansionism and allegations of federal support for Oromia’s leadership, he warned, risked deepening mistrust. Fighters crossing the border, stray bullets and further displacement make this a Kenyan security problem as well as a refugee emergency. For Addis Ababa it is one more front, with the government already fighting in the north, where Eritrea has cut diplomatic ties.

On November 5, Kanja visited Moyale, promised more officers along the border and said Kenya was engaging Ethiopia’s federal government to help end the fighting. One Kenyan had died after being hit by a stray bullet, he said, and a police report indicated that an Ethiopian man had also died of gunshot wounds sustained on Kenyan soil.

Hassan wants to go home, but only when it is safe. Until then she depends on people who have little more than she does.

“Previously, we were supplying this town alone,” Maalim said. “Now we are literally taking care of two towns together.”