Burma

Reuters

Riot policemen stopped a monk on Wednesday as he tried to enter a pagoda in Yangon.

Seth Mydans/NYTimes:

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 magazine based in Thailand 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. Mr. Aung Zaw 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.