"The D.C. establishment backed Yoon because he was what they have wanted for decades"
By Tim Shorrock
In a shocking turn of events, South Koreans went to bed Monday night to the news that their unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, had declared martial law over the country, only to awake on Tuesday to discover that the National Assembly—backed by crowds of citizens gathering in protest—had overruled Yoon and restored their hard-won democratic system.
By Wednesday, an uneasy calm had settled over Seoul. Yoon, who has been praised as a diplomatic wonder and staunch ally by President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appeared to be on his way out. All of Yoon's senior aides, including his chief of staff, have resigned their posts even though the president had accepted the parliamentary demands and lifted his martial law order. Opposition parties in South Korea led by the left-liberal Democratic Party (DP) are now seeking to impeach Yoon over his actions, with the first votes scheduled for Thursday.
Yet even as the coup unravelled in full public view, the close ties between the Pentagon and Yoon's military could present a dilemma for Biden and the next Trump administration. The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea and a U.S. general holds operational control over the Korean Army and the U.S.-South Korean Combined Forces Command during times of war. That has led to serious strains in the bilateral alliance over the years.
The brief, almost comical military takeover in Seoul brought back dark memories of South Korea's last experience with martial law in May 1980, when the renegade general Chun Doo-hwan seized power in a rolling coup and sent airborne special forces to the city of Gwangju to quell the last outburst of demonstrations. His paratroopers massacred hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators, sparking South Korea's first armed uprising since the Korean War and a six-day standoff between Gwangju’s citizens and the U.S.-backed South Korean military.
“Everyone thought that such an event could never happen in South Korea again,” Lee Jae-eui, who witnessed the Gwangju massacre and participated in the uprising, told Drop Site News just after learning of Yoon's action. “Now, exactly 44 years later, an unbelievable ‘martial law declaration’ was heard in a democratized South Korea,” he said. “I thought, what kind of joke is this?” The shadow of Gwangju was also noted in South Korean press coverage of the public’s anger at Yoon. “This feels like we are going through the May 18, 1980, Gwangju uprising again,” one woman at the scene in downtown Seoul told the JoongAng Daily. “You call this a country?”
Similar sentiments were heard throughout the country, from conservatives and progressives alike. Many recalled that former President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of the former dictator, had attempted in 2017 to use the Defense Security Command to declare martial law to forestall her impeachment by the National Assembly (she was thrown out of office and later convicted of corruption). But the generals held back, and several were later prosecuted when the plot was discovered.
Yoon, too, was facing impeachment. He is a former prosecutor who was elected in 2022 by a narrow margin (of 0.8 percentage points) in a vote partly determined by young men furious with the gains made by women in Korea's patriarchal society. Once in power, he sought to reform and improve the country’s export economy by cracking down on South Korea’s powerful labor unions. He attacked opponents of his economic and national security policies as “communists” and pro-North Korean agents. For months, his popularity has dropped to historic lows of just over 10 percent.
Yoon's gambit began at 11:00 pm on Monday night, when Army Chief of Staff General Park An-su, a four-star general, issued a decree of martial law. It sounded much like the 18 years of authoritarian rule under Park Chung-hee, who took power in a military coup in 1961 and ruled with an iron hand until he was assassinated in 1979.
“All political activities, including those related to the National Assembly, regional assemblies, political parties, the forming of political organizations, rallies and protests are banned,” Park stated. “The act of denying free democracy or attempting a subversion is banned; fake news, manipulating public opinion and false instigation is banned.” He added: “Those who violate martial law can be arrested or raided without a warrant.”
Yoon followed with an address to the public. “At the moment, the Republic of Korea is like a candle before the wind—it could plausibly collapse at any time,” he said in a live broadcast. “I declare martial law to protect the [ROK] from the threats of North Korean communist forces, to immediately eradicate the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect our free constitutional order.”
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~ Tim Shorrock is an investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C. and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. He was raised in Japan and South Korea and has been writing about the Korean Peninsula since the late 1970s. In 2015 he was made an honorary citizen of Gwangju for his reporting on the previously unknown US role in the 1980 coup. His work can be found at his website, timshorrock.com
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