The largest street protests in two decades against Myanmar’s military
rulers gained momentum Sunday as thousands of onlookers cheered huge
columns of Buddhist monks and shouted support for the detained
pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Winding for a sixth day through rainy streets, the protest swelled to
10,000 monks in the main city of Yangon, formerly Rangoon, according to
witnesses and other accounts relayed from the closed country, including
some clandestinely shot videos.

It came one day after a group of several hundred monks paid respects to
Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi at the gate of her home, the first time she has been
seen in public in more than four years.

The link between the clergy and the leader of the country’s pro-democracy
movement, the beginnings of large-scale public participation in the
marches and a call by some monks for a wider protest raised the stakes for
the government.

So far, it has mostly allowed the monks free reign in the streets,
apparently fearing a public backlash if it cracks down on them in this
Buddhist nation.

Monks were reported to be parading through a number of cities on Sunday,
notably the country’s second largest city, Mandalay, where an estimated
10,000 people, including 4,000 monks, had marched Saturday.

Myanmar’s military government has sealed off the country to foreign
journalists but information about the protests has been increasingly
flowing out through wire service reports, exile groups in Thailand with
contacts inside Myanmar, and through the photographs, videos and audio
files, carried rapidly by technologies, including the Internet, that the
government has failed to squelch.

The state-controlled press has carried no reports about the monks’
demonstrations.

Since the military crushed a peaceful nationwide uprising in 1988, killing
an estimated 3,000 civilians, the country, formerly known as Burma, has
sunk further into poverty and repression and become a symbol for the
outside world of the harsh military subjugation of a people.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, has been
locked inside her home for 12 of the last 18 years, and the government has
arrested thousands of political prisoners.

The United States and Europe have led a tightening economic boycott that
has been undermined by trade and assistance from Myanmar’s neighbors,
mainly China but also India and some Southeast Asian nations. The United
States has diplomatic relations with Myanmar but no ambassador. President
Bush, his wife, Laura, and a roster of Hollywood celebrities have spoken
out recently about Myanmar, and the abuses of human and political rights
by the military junta are expected to take a high profile at the United
Nations session starting this week.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asked about Myanmar as she arrived at
the United Nations on Sunday, told reporters that the Bush administration
was closely monitoring how the government deals with the protests.

“The Burmese people deserve better,” she said. “They deserve a life to be
able to live in freedom, just as everyone does. And the brutality of this
regime is well known, and so we will be speaking about that and I think
the president will be speaking about it with many of his colleagues.”

The public display of discontent in Myanmar mirrors that of the previous
uprising — anger over a brutal and incompetent military government that
has turned one of Southeast Asia’s best endowed and most sophisticated
nations into one of its most repressed and destitute.

Surreptitiously shot photographs and videos recorded on Sunday showed
thousands of civilians marching quickly through the streets side by side
with the monks, emboldened by the continuing demonstrations into a rare
show of defiance.

Some pictures showed people joining hands in a protective cordon as they
walked beside the monks in their dark red robes. Others showed Buddhist
nuns with shaved heads marching through the streets as onlookers
applauded.

In audio recordings people shouted “Do-aye” — “It is our task” — a slogan
of determination that was also heard on the streets in 1988.

The photographs and videos themselves represented acts of courage in a
closed and repressive country that has tried to quash the spread of
information.

But modern communications technology has brought the protests into the
world’s eye in a way that was not possible in 1988.

Both the government and protesters have so far sought to avoid the kind of
confrontation that led to widespread bloodshed in the 1988 uprising, which
was led mostly by students.

“The monks are the highest moral authority in the Burmese culture,” said
Soe Aung, a spokesman for a coalition of exile groups based in Thailand.
“If something happens to the monks, the situation will spread much faster
than what happened to the students in 1988.”

This gingerly approach by authorities — and the challenges it poses — were
demonstrated on Saturday when guards removed barriers to allow about 500
monks to walk down the tree shaded street where Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi
lives.

She met them at the iron gate outside her home and witnesses told wire
services that she was in tears as she greeted the monks, who chanted
prayers as they faced the security officers with riot shields who sealed
off her home.

On Sunday, witness accounts relayed by exile groups reported that members
of the public shouted their support for her and that some of the
protesting monks also shouted, “Release Suu Kyi!”

Uniformed police officers and soldiers have stayed in the background
throughout a month of building protests. But witnesses said plainclothes
police officers trailed the marchers and some, armed with shotguns, were
posted along the route.

The Associated Press reported that police officers turned back a small
group of monks who tried to march for a second day to the home of Mrs.
Aung San Suu Kyi.

Although she has been sealed off from the public and has been allowed
almost no visitors, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 62, remains a martyr and
rallying symbol for the population.

“She has been out of contact with virtually everyone, but her symbolic
importance cannot be underestimated,” said Basil Fernando, director of the
Asian Human Rights Commission. “Symbolically, her reintroduction into the
political life of the country at such a dire moment is of enormous
importance.”

The daughter of an assassinated independence hero, Aung San, she came to
prominence when she became a leader in the pro-democracy demonstrations of
1988.

Her political party, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide
victory in parliamentary elections in 1990, although the junta, fearing
her charismatic appeal, had already placed her under house arrest.

The military government annulled the election results and held on to
power. But it miscalculated the public mood again in 2002 when it released
her from house arrest and allowed her to tour the country, visiting party
offices.

She drew increasingly large and enthusiastic crowds until a band of
government-backed thugs attacked a convoy in which she was traveling,
killing several people. The government seized her again and placed under
even stricter house arrest, cutting off her telephone and deepening her
isolation.

The latest protests began Aug. 19 in response to sharp, unannounced fuel
price increases of up to 500 percent, immediately raising the prices of
goods and transportation.

They were led at first by former student protesters and other activists,
but most of the leaders had been arrested or were in hiding when the monks
began their protests last Tuesday.

The monks were apparently motivated at first by an attack on a small
demonstration at which security officers fired shots into the air and beat
a number of monks.

Since then, the monks’ protests have spread from city to city and have
become more overtly political.

On Saturday, an organization of clergy called the All Burma Monks
Alliance, called for a widening of the protests in a statement that said,
“In order to banish the common enemy evil regime from Burmese soil
forever, united masses of people need to join hands with the united clergy
forces.”

It went on, “We pronounce the evil military despotism, which is
impoverishing and pauperizing our people of all walks, including the
clergy, as the common enemy of all our citizens.”