The aftershocks of last Tuesday’s declaration, and then cancellation, of martial law by President Yoon Suk Yeol continue to be felt by South Korea’s ruling elite. Every day brings a new development and fresh revelations in this shocking and somewhat bizarre episode, along with evidence of the deep fissures in what had seemed a stable and relatively harmonious society.
Yoon survived an impeachment vote on 7 December, but will likely face another on Saturday. He is under police investigation and two attempts have reportedly been made to raid his parliamentary office. There have been protests and strikes (by metalworkers at Kia plants) in a push for his exit. He has vowed to fight on.
Yoon and his wife have been linked to shamans before
Senior military figures, though, are in despair. Former defence minister and lieutenant general Kim Yong-hyun, who was arrested on Wednesday (the martial law declaration was said to have been his idea), attempted suicide at a detention centre. Meanwhile, Commander Kim Hyun-tae took full responsibility for the dispatch of troops to the parliament building on the night of the declaration and declared himself to be ‘incompetent’.
There are extraordinary theories as to what motivated President Yoon, or at least what motivated the timing of the martial law declaration. He made the announcement at 10:23 on 3 December, which when written in ancient kanji has the same meaning as ‘king’ apparently. Yoon and his wife have been linked to shamans before and were rumoured to have refused to live in the presidential Blue House on the advice of one mystic. Ironically, if Yoon had made the announcement in the middle of the night, when the parliament building had no one to defend it, he might even have been successful.
Of wider significance perhaps is the dawning realisation of how naïve it was to assume that the days of military rule in South Korea had been consigned to the dark and distant past. The relics of those troubled days, including a blurring of the civic-military boundaries and a propensity to see dissent as a threat to the established order and thus a legitimate target for suppression, are clearly still an active and potentially destabilising element in South Korean governance.
In a piece in Foreign Policy, professor at the Daniel K Inouye Asia-Pacific centre for Security Studies Lami Kim argues that we shouldn’t have been so surprised, and that martial law was always more of a possibility than people realised. Kim points out that in the supposedly democratic modern era, key civilian security roles have habitually been filled by former army officers, all graduates of the KMA military academy (including all three of Yoon’s defence ministers).
This, Kim implies, raises the spectre of the ‘Hanahoe’ – a secret cabal of military officers which was formed in 1963 and exerted great influence in South Korean politics (including in the 17 May coup of 1980 and in the violent suppression of the Gwangju uprising) until forcibly disbanded in 1993. Could some analogous grouping with the mindset of the Hanahoe still be exerting a malign influence today?
It is an uncomfortable thought, but in a country where all men serve at least 18 months in the army and with a hostile nuclear power on its doorstep it is inevitable that the military will be a constant, perhaps necessary, factor in political considerations. But, as Kim points out, to have so many ex-KMA officers in government raises doubts about their impartiality and makes them vulnerable to the influence of a civilian leader, such as Yoon, seeking mobilization for political purposes.
It is not as if there weren’t warnings. Thoughts have been returning to 2017 when plans were drawn up for martial law to suppress protests in the event of then President Park Geun-hye (who was facing an impeachment hearing) being reinstated. Six thousand troops were to be deployed to key locations, including the Government Complex, National Assembly and offices of media outlets.
What the military elites appear not to have anticipated this time is the unwillingness of the troops to follow through on what were constitutionally dubious orders. I spoke to one former member of the presidential guard who told me that the young conscripts, some of whom he knew personally, were distinctly uneasy with their orders and did a poor job as a result. ‘Their hearts weren’t in it’ he told me. The other factor the top brass veterans failed to appreciate was the power of social media. News of the encirclement of parliament spread with such rapidity that resistance was mobilised quickly and efficiently.
Yoon is emerging from all this as an eccentric (he once serenaded US President Joe Biden with a rendition of ‘American Pie’ at a White House reception), perhaps unstable, figure, whose deeply religious background (he went to a Protestant missionary school) may have given him a sense of personal destiny and authority derived from a higher power.
‘Yoon tends to act more on instinct than rationality,’ said Ahn Byung-jin, professor at Kyung Hee university – which would make him a less than ideal choice for leader of a nation in such a precarious geopolitical environment.
He was apparently taking golf lessons recently in the expectation of some fairway diplomacy with incoming US President Donald Trump. But he looks to have blown it; faced with a tricky lie he chose entirely the wrong club, with disastrous consequences.
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