Military Enforces Calm in Nepal After Two Days of Chaos

Soldiers fanned out across Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, on Wednesday, imposing calm as leaders of a protest movement that forced out the country’s prime minister held talks with the military.

It was a sharp turn for the youthful protest movement, which earlier in the week had battled security forces in violent confrontations that left 30 people dead and many government buildings in ruin.

As debris and ash were swept from the streets on Wednesday, the leaders of the movement, which is known as Gen Z, demanded early elections to fill the political void.

In a step toward normalcy, Nepal’s civil aviation authority on Wednesday opened Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, a major gateway to the country, after a security review. Flights had been suspended since Tuesday afternoon.

But evidence of the outpouring of anger by protesters in previous days was present across the capital. With fully armed soldiers patrolling the capital, groups of Nepalis took to the streets to clear rubble from the rioting.

The protests left a swath of destruction: Parliament buildings, the Supreme Court and ministries inside the Singha Durbar complex, the seat of government, were all damaged, some of them heavily. Protesters set fire to the offices of the Nepal Traffic Police and the Nepal Communist Party’s offices, and the personal residences of the ousted prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, and at least four other former prime ministers.

The largest media conglomerate in the country, the Kantipur Media Group, said it had suspended two of its digital editions, kathmandupost.com and ekantipur.com, after protesters burned its offices and servers.

The Nepali military issued a statement on Wednesday morning ordering the public to hand over any arms, ammunition, grenades or military equipment picked up or looted during the first two days of the protests. And Nepal’s thousand-mile border with India, normally a hive of activity and crossings, was sealed except for those needing medical assistance.

The protests were triggered by a government ban last week on major social media platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram and two dozen others. Anger at the bans added to years of frustration over official corruption and the wide gap between the wealthy and poor. In the weeks before the ban, images purporting to show the children of Nepal’s elites ensconced in luxury ricocheted across social media.

Protesters became further enraged on Monday after government forces, mainly police officers, fired live rounds, rubber bullets and water cannons into the crowds, killing 18 people and injuring scores more.

The government reversed the social media ban the following day, and the prime minister and some of his cabinet ministers resigned, but the unrest escalated, with protesters defying a curfew.

Some protest organizers said they regretted that the demonstrations had turned violent.

Tanuja Pandey, a Gen Z organizer and recent university graduate, said that she and other Gen Z protesters met with the Army chief, Gen. Ashok Raj Sigdel, on Tuesday evening, to try to tell him that her group was not responsible for the arson attacks in the capital.

“Killing people, demolishing things, vandalizing, looting — this is not our generation,” Ms. Pandey said in an interview. “We wanted progress, not to push things back by 10 years at least because everything has been dismantled.”

Ms. Pandey said that her family come under criticism for her role in the protests.

“I hope one day they will be proud of me,” she said of her parents, her voice cracking with emotion. “Because now, everyone blames us, our generation, for having caused something we did not do.”