Riot policemen stopped a monk on Wednesday as he tried to enter a pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar.
BANGKOK, Sept. 27 — Brutality and defiance marked the second day of an armed crackdown in Myanmar today as the military junta tried to crush a wave of nationwide protests in the face of harsh international condemnation.
Tear gas hovered above the steps of the Shwedagon Pagoda on Wednesday in Yangon as the riot police broke up demonstrations.
The violence began before dawn with raids on Buddhist monasteries and continued through the day with tear gas, beatings and volleys of gunfire in the streets of the country’s main city, Yangon, according to witnesses and news agency reports from inside the closed nation.
Witnesses said soldiers fired automatic weapons into a crowd of protesters. Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that one Japanese national had been killed and there were unconfirmed reports of several other deaths, including another foreigner.
Despite a heavy military and police presence, protests gained momentum through the day in several parts of the city. But with the authorities clamping down on telephone and Internet communications, human rights groups and exiles said they were having increasing difficulty in getting information.
State television in Myanmar reported that nine people had been killed and that 11 demonstrators and 31 soldiers were injured. The numbers could not be independently verified and exile groups said they could be much higher. The Japanese embassy said one of the dead was a Japanese photographer, Kenji Nagai.
The violence of the past two days has answered the question of whether the military would fire on Buddhist monks, the highly revered moral core of Burmese society. For the past 10 days, the monks have led demonstrations that grew to as many as 100,000 before the crackdown began.
“The military is the one who proudly claims to preserve and protect Buddhism in the country, but now they are killing the monks,” said Aung Zaw, editor of The Irrawaddy, a Thailand-based magazine that has extensive contacts inside Myanmar.
Like others monitoring the crisis, which began on Aug. 19 with scattered protests against steep fuel price increases, he said it was difficult to learn the numbers of dead in a chaotic situation in which hospital sources are sometimes reluctant to talk. He said he had been told of one death today when soldiers attacked two columns of monks and other people.
“The military trucks, I was told, just drove in and soldiers jumped out and started shooting,” he said, describing a scene that was reminiscent of the mass killings in 1988, when the current junta came to power after suppressing a similar peaceful public uprising. On Wednesday, the junta acknowledged the death of one man, but news agencies and exile groups put the number as high as seven.
Myanmar’s chief international patron, China, blocked an effort on Wednesday by the United States and European countries to have the United Nations Security Council condemn the violent crackdown. But today China added its important voice to criticism from abroad when it publicly called for restraint.
“As a neighbor, China is extremely concerned about the situation in Myanmar,” the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said at a news briefing in Beijing. “China hopes that all parties in Myanmar exercise restraint and properly handle the current issue so as to ensure the situation there does not escalate and get complicated.”
In January, China had vetoed another move by the United States at the United Nations to censure Myanmar, saying Burmese internal affairs had no effect on peace and stability outside its borders.
Speaking in Beijing today, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who was taking part in international talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, said, “We all need to agree on the fact that the Burmese government has got to stop thinking that this can be solved by police and military.”
Superstitious Burmese had predicted violence on this date, whose digits add up repeatedly to the astrologically powerful number 9: The 27th day of the ninth month in 2007.
There was no indication that international pressure would have any more effect on the junta than it has had over two decades of political pressure or economic sanctions like those announced at the United Nations this week by President Bush.
“The big missing piece of the puzzle is what is going on in the minds of the senior leadership,” said Thant Myint-U, a former United Nations official who is author a book on Myanmar, formerly Burma, “River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma.” “Nothing that they have said in the last 20 years would suggest that they will back down.”
The government’s actions in the past two days seemed to bear this out.
In the raids early today, The Associated Press reported, security forces fired shots at one of several monasteries, Ngwe Kyar Yan, where one monk said a number of monks were beaten and at least 70 of its 150 monks were arrested.
A female lay disciple said a number of monks were arrested at Moe Gaung Monastery, which was being guarded, like a number of other monasteries, by a contingent of armed security personnel.
Other unconfirmed reports from exile groups described scenes of brutality and humiliation of monks and their superiors when soldiers entered the monasteries.
“We were told by a lot of residents that the soldiers came in very rudely and told them to kneel down,” Aung Zaw said. “Their senior abbot was beaten in front of the others. They were told to walk like dogs. That news quickly spread, and whether it is rumor or true, people got very, very angry.”
Sunai Pasuk, a representative of Human Rights Watch in Thailand, said that he was concerned about the apparently large numbers of arrests of monks and lay people but that information about them was scarce.
Like others seeking news from inside the country, he said that the mobile telephones of his sources had apparently been cut off. There were also reports that the authorities were closing Internet cafés, where people had been downloading and transmitting images from their telephone cameras.
“We have lost all contacts inside Burma,” he said. “We cannot reach them any more.”
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