Along with last week’s unexpected overthrow of the al-Assad regime in Syria, the dramatic events that unfolded in South Korea caught most of the world by surprise. On the evening of Dec. 3, conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol imposed emergency martial law in a televised address, citing the threat posed to the country by both “North Korean communist forces” and “anti-state forces.” This was the first time martial law has been declared in South Korea since 1980 when a military coup was carried out by Chun Doo-hwan after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee the year before.
Although the military tried to prevent legislators from entering the National Assembly building to cast votes to override President Yoon’s martial declaration, with help from tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters enough lawmakers got through to overturn the order announced six hours earlier. Following these events, the Justice Ministry has banned Yoon and eight of his allies from leaving the country, and also arrested a former South Korean defense minister for his alleged role in issuing the martial law order. Authorities are investigating whether Yoon and his collaborators’ acts constitute rebellion.
The opposition Democratic party, which has a majority in parliament, has attempted to impeach President Yoon but has been thwarted by governing party lawmakers who’ve boycotted legislative sessions in order to block the two-thirds majority vote required. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Dr. John Carl Baker, deputy director of programs with the Ploughshares Fund, who discusses the success of pro-democracy forces in South Korea, and the dangers a successful right-wing coup would have had on regional stability.
JOHN CARL BAKER: It’s been a very dramatic week, certainly for Korean politics, but really for the world. On Tuesday night, almost out of the blue, (President) Yoon Suk Yeol announced that he was instituting emergency martial law. He cited as the reason gridlock, basically in the legislature and also the threat posed by people that he views as subversive.
And one of the things that has been consistent throughout Yoon’s presidency is that he has tried repeatedly to tar his opponents — let’s not forget, the vast majority of the Korean people as “North Korea sympathizers,” essentially. And so he made this announcement and, really almost instantly there were troops in the streets of Seoul. There were helicopters circling around. I mean, this was clearly an attempt to seize power. And South Korea has a history of not only being under dictatorship, but fighting against it.
And they’ve not only beat back dictators in the past to establish their democracy in the first place, but in recent history have beat back attempts by the previous conservative government to remain in power when they were embattled due to corruption scandals.
So this is something that’s a very live history in South Korea and they take very seriously the need to prevent any kind of return to military dictatorship.
And what ended up happening is the Yoon government sent troops into the National Assembly to try to prevent legislators from voting and try to prevent there being enough legislators for them to basically have enough votes to overturn his order. But the South Korean people amassed near the National Assembly, they rallied and they helped legislators enter the building. And really, within a just a few hours, enough legislators were there that they voted 192 to 0 to rescind Yoon’s order.
And at that point, he essentially had no choice but to stand down. And his attempt to seize power had failed. He will probably be impeached, although things are very up in the air right now. The last vote to try to impeach him failed because his own party boycotted the proceedings. They came into the Assembly for one vote and then when there was a vote to impeach him, they just left.
So they are for this moment, trying to impede the democratic process, which leaves South Korean politics in a real state of limbo.
SCOTT HARRIS: And Dr. Baker, what was the danger if President Yoon had succeeded in dismantling Democratic rule and imposing a dictatorship in South Korea? In your view, would that have triggered deeper regional tension and confrontation between the U.S. and its allies and China?
JOHN CARL BAKER: I think there would be many dangers. I mean, for one thing, it would be just a sign of intense aggression in South Korea, which really has a quite heroic history of emergence from dictatorship.
But I think one of the most worrisome byproducts of it would be greater tensions between North and South because one of the things that defines conservatism in South Korea is hawkishness towards the North.
And if you have North Korea, which is already prone to provocations on the peninsula, you know, on one part of it, and in the South you have a conservative right-wing military dictatorship, you have real potential for conflict on the peninsula. And that would be an extremely worrisome scenario that has the potential to not only cause a war, but blow up all sorts of international, you know, problems that have kind of been tamped down over the last few years.
Things on the peninsula are a bit of a powder keg. It’s not that we’re constantly, you know, on a knife edge there. But if you had a dramatic event like the government in South Korea becoming a military dictatorship, you could really see potential for a war.
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