NAIROBI — When Magdelene Njeri felt the first pains of labour begin yesterday afternoon, her knees buckled and she sank nearly to the ground. It was not the pain; she has had four children, and she knows she will survive the pain of delivering this one.

It was simply the despair, she said: Today, the Kenyan government will send police with tear gas and batons to drive her out - out of the cow stall in the Nairobi fairgrounds where she has been sleeping on a cardboard box for the past two weeks. She can't go home, to Molo in the Rift Valley, where a rioting mob attacked and beat her, or to Kibera, the Nairobi slum where she was born and raised but where her old neighbourhood is now charred rubble.

"I don't have a blanket to wrap this baby in, or even one shilling to take me to the hospital, and now the government says I must go. But where can I go?"

Kenya's government is insisting it will close the displacement camps that have sprung up across the country since violence broke out after a disputed election on Dec. 27, determined to show that life is returning to normal here. The camp, set up in the brightly painted fairgrounds, which now houses a centre to trace lost children and another where people with HIV can get emergency drugs, is a big, well-publicized sign that this is still a country with a crisis, so the government says refugees must get out today.

At least 250,000 people are displaced, and aid agencies including Unicef say it is not safe for them to go home. The violence continues, with the death toll now nearing 700.

And when a group of demonstrators marched in downtown Nairobi yesterday, heavily armed brigades of riot police beat them back, sending crowds of business people in suits and high heels sprinting from the choking clouds of gas.

Former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan arrived in Nairobi yesterday to lead the latest round of international efforts to end Kenya's political stalemate. President Mwai Kibaki had himself sworn in again, hours after results were released from a poll that all observers agree was manipulated. Opposition Leader Raila Odinga, whose supporters insist that he won the vote, is demanding a new election and calling for widespread demonstrations and economic boycotts until Mr. Kibaki gives up power.

The government's strategy has been to press on solidifying its position and power; it says there will be no new vote. Mr. Odinga's supporters have shown themselves capable of violent protest, but Mr. Kibaki appears unmoved. So entrenched are the two sides that it is uncertain what Mr. Annan can hope to achieve here. "Even if they cut a deal, is that good for Kenya?" a Western diplomat here asked yesterday. "So they divide the spoils?"

While the political brinkmanship plays out on the terraces of Nairobi's posh hotels, Ms. Njeri and her neighbours in the cow-shed-cum-shelter say they know they are the pawns in the game.

Life in the cow stall, which has a cold cement floor infested with insects and split rail fence for walls, is horrible. But Ms. Nejri said she felt safe there. "The police came here yesterday and said we could go home, it was safe, but we don't believe them," she said. "At night we hear screams from Kibera," which is just down the hill below the fairgrounds, she added. All around her, women nodded assent and chorused, "It's not safe!"

Kibera was calm yesterday; most of the roadblocks are down, and street-side bike repairs and charcoal sales have resumed. But thousands of people have lost their homes; they were either set alight deliberately by mobs targeting a neighbourhood dominated by one ethnic group, or when fires on roadblocks spread uncontrolled.

"We will go to a neighbour," said Alice Muhonja, as she walked from the fairgrounds back to the slum with her two children yesterday afternoon, determined to get out before the tear gas. "And they will take care of us for a few days. But when the food runs out, charity also stops." With the addition of her family of four, the neighbour's one-room shack will now be home to 10 people. Ms. Muhonja's vegetable stall was burnt, and she lost all her clothes and possessions when their home was torched. Her daughter Eustace, 4, twirled in orange chiffon yesterday; she, fortunately, was wearing her favourite dress when they had to flee.

The first spasm of violence here, in the early days of the new year, was spontaneous anger over the election results and the way Mr. Kibaki's government handled them: banning media coverage and public gatherings. The anger was met by a wave of state violence, with police shooting unarmed demonstrators. But the most alarming response has been a flare-up of decades-old tensions in Kenya over access to land and power and how those are split between ethnic groups, leading to the displacements, brutal slayings and attacks with ethnic overtones such as that in which Ms. Njeri was beaten in Molo.

"The people who came for us, in the dark, we didn't know them - but I think my neighbours brought them because they always say we are on their land," she said. Now, she reckons the neighbours will have occupied it.

Ms. Njeri was treated after the beating at a Nairobi hospital, where a new box has been added to the standard patient intake card she now carries with her: "Victim of postelection violence."