South Korea:
Dictatorship’s Shadow

Dec 16, 2024

This article is translated from the December 13 issue, #2941 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

At 10:20 p.m. on Tuesday, December 3, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law. At around 4:30 a.m., he was forced to recognize the failure of his initiative and rescinded the decision himself. This event, shocking to the South Korean population, shows just how dangerous those in power can be.

The South Korean president is a hard-right politician who, just over a year ago, broke a massive strike organized by the truckers’ union by declaring it “illegal.” Shortly afterwards, he also imprisoned representatives of the construction union. But the last parliamentary elections, this past April, were a defeat for his party, giving the opposition almost a two-thirds majority. Yoon Suk Yeol has been exasperated by this opposition, which stood up to him in Parliament over the budget vote, so he attempted his military takeover. He declared that he was introducing martial law to “eradicate pro-North Korean forces and protect the democratic constitutional order.” As in the good old days of South Korea’s military dictatorship, the threat from the North was used as a pretext. It seemed like he wanted to remind all those who had forgotten that in Korea, dictators were not only in the North.

Yoon and his Minister of Defense set up a special staff, comprising a number of senior officers, including the commander of the First Special Forces Brigade. For a few hours, in the middle of the night, troops were stationed in the capital, Seoul, and stormed several public buildings, including the National Assembly. Several people were arrested, including trade unionists and the president of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU).

The announcement, made live on television, chilled a large part of the Korean population. “When I heard the news, I screamed. I couldn’t sleep. I watched the news on YouTube because I didn’t trust television,” said a protestor against martial law. “I was on the subway when I heard about it. I immediately thought of Gwangju. I imagined tanks and soldiers in the street,” said another.

The last time the South Korean government implemented martial law was at the height of the military dictatorship, in March 1980, to suppress protest movements, including the uprising in the southern city of Gwangju. In this city, after the army fired on a demonstrating crowd, the population looted police stations to arm themselves, organized militias and held the city for a few days until the army re-entered and carried out a bloodbath.

So it’s easy to understand why, 40 years on, thousands of Koreans reacted spontaneously, in the middle of the night, and demonstrated in front of the military-held National Assembly, like the man who said of Yoon: “He wants to plunge the country into darkness. Just like previous dictatorships. We won’t let the youth of our country fall to his blows.” On Saturday, December 7, hundreds of thousands of people—one million according to the organizers—demonstrated to demand the president’s impeachment.…

[On December 13, after massive protests, Korean lawmakers finally voted to impeach Yoon and suspend him from office.]

The U.S. Deputy Secretary of State described imposing martial law as a “serious error of judgement.” In other words, “you don’t attempt a coup d’état lightly and without sufficient preparation.” The United States has several military bases in the country, and an American general even heads the South Korean army. Since the Korean War, the South Korean army has been part of the military forces “allied” against North Korea, under American tutelage. Although the United States claims not to have been informed of the President’s intentions, it does seem to want to spare him and find him an honorable way out. After all, the South Korean state and its army are the guarantor of their political and economic interests in this country, and a pillar of their presence in this part of the world.

The media showed opposition MPs confronting the military and presented them as the bulwark that prevented the coup. This is a lie. If Yoon Suk Yeol’s coup can be seen as a farce, it’s because it was the initiative of an individual with dreams of dictatorship for himself and his cronies, who failed to get the bulk of the military leadership on board. It was certainly not the resistance of the deputies that could have prevented it.

This sudden turn of events showed that the army’s general staff has its finger on the trigger, and that some of the country’s political leaders are ready to opt for military dictatorship. All this, ultimately, under the protection of the U.S. government.

Dictatorship in South Korea has a long history. It was only at the end of the 1980s that the regime put on a democratic façade, particularly after the working class mobilized in explosive, long-lasting strikes affecting the whole country and involving millions of workers.

In fact, the apparatus of dictatorship is still there, ready to resurface.