Issue:
January 2025
South Korea’s impeachment fiasco had created a dangerous leadership vacuum
Karl Marx famously wrote that “great world-historic facts and personages” appear “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Communism’s founder would have savoured the vaudeville travesty of South Korea’s president declaring martial law that lasted just six hours. Yoon Suk Yeol’s staunch defence of his decree cites the unrelenting obstruction he faced from a legislature controlled by the opposition. (Yet Emmanuel Macron has a similar problem in governing France without resort to sending troops to the Assemble e Nationale …)
Media have gleefully pounced on more colourful causes, such as Yoon’s frustration over the constant hounding of his glamorous wife, Kim Keon Hee. She has strongly denied scurrilous rumours of having been a nightclub hostess before marrying Yoon, 12 years her senior. Among numerous corruption allegations, none has been more potent than the “gift” of a $2,200 Christian Dior handbag.
Kim Jung Ha, an editorial writer at the conservative- leaning JoongAng Ilbo, says that Yoon is addicted to power, YouTube videos and alcohol. As prosecutor general (2019-21), Yoon already was intoxicated by power, according to the journalist. ‘His ego and frustration could have reached a boiling point when the main opposition got in the way of every step he had made after its landslide win in the April parliamentary election … He must have regarded the martial law edict no differently from filing an arrest warrant.’
Yoon is also said to be dangerously hooked on watching YouTube channels that amplify the views of Korean rightists and conspiracy theorists. ‘While traditional media mostly find faults in state management, these channels attribute all the setbacks to pro-Pyongyang, anti-state forces threatening the free democratic order,’ Kim Jung Ha writes. He adds that ‘Yoon has been a heavy drinker for decades.’ and ‘caused colossal harm to himself and the nation through his alcohol-induced misjudgement. He should cut down on drinking in the new year.’
Impeached by the National Assembly, Yoon so far has refused to cooperate with prosecutors investigating charges of insurrection, abuse of authority and obstructing people from exercising their rights. Yoon and his three most senior fellow plotters – his former defence minister, interior minister and head of military intelligence – all graduated from Choongam High School, a prestigious, fee-paying boys’ high school in a leafy suburb of Seoul. Korean magazine reporting of a ‘Choongam clique’ prompted the school’s superintendent to rebuke the vilified alumni. “We at Choongam educate our students as democratic citizens, to value and treasure democracy,” she told AFP. “The acts perpetrated by those people are faults of the individual that do not reflect our ideals.” The superintendent added, “ As a school we feel uneasy and distressed about how our education is being faulted for these acts.”
Farce creeps into another tier of conspiracy. Noh Sang Won was formerly head of the Defence Intelligence Command. Dishonourably discharged in 2018 following a conviction for sexual assault - during an Armed Forces Day dinner, he had forced a female cadet to sit on his lap before fondling her – Noh became a Korean shaman, running a fortune- telling business out of his home in the Ansan suburb of Seoul. Reporters who accompanied police found a door sign associated with shamanism as well as a pile of dried fish and bottles of alcohol used in rituals. Police told the JoongAng that a notebook belonging to Noh contained many memos relating to martial law, including references to “blocking the National Assembly,” and to politicians, journalists, religious leaders, labour union members, judges and public servants as “targets to collect.”
Two days before Yoon declared martial law on December 3, Noh met with Defence Intelligence Commander Moon Sang Ho and two of his colonels to finalise plans. Their top-secret rendezvous was a Lotteria burger bar in Ansan, about a mile from Noh’s residence. According to the centre-left Hankyoreh, Noh instructed the two colonels “to select 35 lieutenant colonels and majors from the 820 Counterintelligence Unit,” excluding those from the opposition bastion in the Honam region of southwestern Korea, to prepare to “enter the National Election Commission (NEC) at dawn on December 4, kidnap 30 key workers, and take them to the Capital Defence Command’s B1 Bunker”.
Yoon’s former defence minister Kim Yong Hyun, who attempted suicide after being detained by police, reportedly told the Dong-A Ilbo that he had sent martial law forces to the NEC on December 3 to secure evidence of electoral fraud. As the Hankyoreh noted, the way in which the “Choongam High clique” used the lure of promotion to induce officers to take part in the martial law plot was a chilling echo of two infamous coup d’etats that spawned military dictatorships.
The backbone of the May 16, 1961, coup that installed Park Chun Hee as leader was the eighth class of the Korea Military Academy, steered by Kim Jong Pil. The December 12, 1979, coup that followed Park Chun Hee’s assassination by his spy chief was hatched by Hanahoe, a secret society led by graduates of the 11th class of the Korea Military Academy, including Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo.
In his martial law speech, Yoon called the National Assembly “a den of criminals ... planning for the overthrow of our liberal democratic order,” and spoke of his determination to “immediately eradicate the unscrupulous pro-Pyongyang anti-state forces that village the freedom and happiness of our people”. The allegation of “conniving with North Korea” reminded Simon Smith, a former UK ambassador to Seoul, “of the language that previous regimes in South Korea used to use … as a pretext for curtailing civil liberties”.
Koreans too young to recall the 1979 coup led by Chun Doo Hwan and its aftermath - the martial law crackdown on political dissent and the arrest of Kim Dae Jung that sparked the May 1980 Gwangju uprising, its bloody suppression and the death sentence given to Kim Dae Jung for allegedly fomenting the revolt – have been reminded by the film 12.12: The Day, which has been packing Korean cinemas and topping the local Netflix chart. This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature award to Gwangju-born Han Kang also drew attention to the historical trauma. Her novel Human Acts was based on the 1980 rebellion.
Gwangju did not immediately make Chun Doo Hwan an international pariah. As soon as the general became South Korean president, through a rigged election that barred the main opposition candidates from running, he was feted by Ronald Reagan at a White House summit in February 1981. Margaret Thatcher also indulged the general as a fellow warrior against communism. Thatcher visited Seoul in May 1986 while Kim Dae Jung was still under house arrest, yet her speech at the Seoul Press Centre made no mention of democracy. I exhumed my question to her from the archive of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation: “Prime Minister, in your remarks before, you mentioned your admiration for the liberty of South Korea. Which particular liberty are you referring to? Do you include, for instance, the freedom of speech in the several liberties you outlined?”
The next day we flew with Thatcher in Chinook helicopters to the DMZ, where the Iron Lady posed for photographs peering into the heart of communist darkness. I was the only member of the posse to have visited North Korea, and I had no illusions about what life was like on the other side of the minefield. The horrors of totalitarianism were still no justification for repressing dissent in the capitalist world, and I thought at the time that Thatcher was utterly wrong not to have requested a meeting with Kim Dae Dung or invited him to the British Embassy – to hell with protocol. Twelve years later he was elected president of South Korea, and in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The impeachment of Yoon has created a leadership vacuum in South Korea just as Donald Trump is poised to become U.S. president and impose swinging tariffs that would seriously harm South Korea’s economy. The martial law fiasco also threatens to unravel the security framework assembled by the United States, Japan and South Korea in recent years in order to confront China.
Opinion polls in South Korea all point to Lee Jae Myung, firebrand leader of the left-leaning Democratic Party, succeeding Yoon as president. Lee’s parents cleaned public toilets for a living and as a teenager he worked in a sweatshop. The contrast with South Korea’s upper-middle class elite is as razor-sharp as that parodied in the Oscar-winning Parasite. Unsurprisingly, Lee appears more interested in domestic issues of social justice than strengthening security ties with the U.S. and the old colonial power Japan.
The conclusion to the first impeachment resolution against Yoon in the National Assembly brought dismay to Washington and Tokyo. It read: “In addition, under the guise of so-called value diplomacy, [President Yoon Suk Yeol] has neglected geopolitical balance, antagonizing North Korea, China, and Russia, adhering to a bizarre Japan-centred foreign policy, and appointing Japan-oriented individuals to key government positions, thereby causing isolation in Northeast Asia and triggering a crisis of war, abandoning its duty to protect national security and its people.”
Where is the “geopolitical balance” in North Korea's development of nuclear weapons, its dispatch of 12,000 troops to support Russia in its war with Ukraine – the first time East Asian and European regular forces have clashed since the French withdrawal from Indochina in the 1950s – or supplying Russia with millions of artillery and mortar shells, as well as ballistic missiles? In return, Russia is giving North Korea aid worth billions of dollars, including valuable military technology.
North Korea’s experience of actual combat in Kursk will also help train its forces for modern warfare. And what of China? In 1979, when Chun Doo Hwan was plotting his coup d’etat in Seoul, China was still a third-world power emerging from decades of Maoist isolation. It is now an economic and military goliath shaking the world order. Yoon may have been a clown but there is nothing comical about the challenges facing South Korea.
Peter McGill is a former Tokyo correspondent of the Observer and president of the FCCJ.
