South Korea’s sloppy coup attempt: Why’d Yoon do it?

Journalists going after a story traditionally focus on answering the “five Ws” but that has often been difficult in South Korea.

That certainly was the case during a period of martial law in the 1970s and 1980s when the military-backed government had all the tools needed to intimidate Korean journalists. Government agents were known to spy on foreign journalists using wiretaps and sought to compromise some via honey traps baited with supplied sexual partners.

The country has grown more transparent since becoming a democracy in 1987. Tuesday’s sloppy attempt at a coup d’etat by President Yoon Suk Yeol failed before any censors in the coup plotters’ group could keep the world from learning the pretty fully available answers to four of the five W questions regarding the incident: the who, the what, the when and the where.

It looks like Yoon colluded with elements of the military by appointing General Park An-su, the Republic of Korea Army’s chief of staff, as martial law commander. But, in the National Assembly in Seoul on Tuesday (December 3), with soldiers in battle gear trying to get in and shut down the country’s parliament, Yoon’s own civilian party leader turned on the president.

Yoon had stacked the military with loyalists, but he hadn’t protected his civilian flank. He had decreed martial law, but his order was rejected in parliament.

As of this writing, we’re waiting to see if the general and his immediate boss, Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun, reportedly blamed by the president for bad advice, step down and how the whole mess ends up affecting the worse-than-awkward standing of a president who’s highly unpopular halfway through a five-year elected term.

From answers to those four Ws, much of the news-consuming world knows enough that many people will feel justified in dismissively describing the affair as a farcical return to 1980s politics. As Karl Marx said: First time tragedy, second time farce.

But in truth we don’t know quite enough to be sure that’s a fair judgment. What’s in short supply with this story so far is the fifth W, the why. Why did Yoon do it?

Start with the explanation he gave in his televised address announcing martial law Tuesday night Seoul time:

To safeguard a liberal South Korea from the threats posed by North Korea’s communist forces and to eliminate anti-state elements plundering people’s freedom and happiness, I hereby declare emergency martial law.

Let’s give the president the benefit of the doubt and assume, for the moment, for purposes of figuring things out, that his warriors recommended that course of action.

Listening to Yoon’s reference to “threats posed by North Korea’s communist forces,” retired US Marine Colonel Grant Newsham, who often writes for Asia Times about military matters, says in an email that he is “curious to know why he did it and why the military went along. Something specific? If not, not a good move.”

So let’s ask why the defense minister, and the army under General Park, backed Yoon’s scheme until National Assembly lawmakers stood up to be counted and voted to reject the presidential order.

There is, indeed, a history here. Using an alleged heightened threat from North Korea as a pretext for grabbing power is how the military-backed regime rolled back in the 1970s and ’80s.

One of the two writers of the piece you’re reading (the one who is wondering today if the Seoul Hilton concierge is still storing his gas mask and helmet in readiness for the next round) was involved directly in just such a case.

After the October 26, 1979, assassination of South Korean President Park Chung Hee, when there was great confusion in the South, the North did not yield to the temptation to move southward militarily in units large enough to be detected. Some reports from Seoul to the contrary were outright lies, concocted by the forces backing upstart Major General Chun Doo-hwan in his ultimately successful power grab.

Correspondents from the Baltimore Sun Tokyo bureau caught South Korean government officials red-handed in the fabrication of a report – intended to defuse student demonstrations – that Northern moves to invade the South appeared to be underway.

Briefing South Korean newsmen in Seoul on May 10, 1980, Prime Minister Shin Hyon-hwak claimed that a “close ally” had informed the government that North Korea’s infiltration-trained Eighth Army Corps had been out of sight of intelligence surveillance for some time. The unit might surface in South Korea, perhaps between May 15 and May 20.

At the time, South Korea had only two “close allies,” the United States and Japan. Thus it was a simple matter to check, and to report in the Sun the next morning, that neither ally had provided this information.

Instead, the Japanese said the South Koreans had been trying to peddle the “intelligence” to them, claiming it came from China – a country that certainly was not a close ally. “The South Korean inquiry appeared to be something of an advertising balloon,” a Japanese source said dryly.

With this historical background, there should have been no surprise early Wednesday when – after the South Korean special forces soldiers assigned to enforce martial law by closing down the National Assembly had left the premises and the mission had been abandoned – the military announced that no unusual North Korean movements had been detected.

“What do you think Kim Jong Un will do?” asks Stanford’s Daniel Sneider, whose Asia Times byline is familiar to you, dear readers. “Sit tight and enjoy the show, I imagine.”

In fact, the action on the streets of Seoul so far doesn’t sound anywhere near enough to make North Korea’s Kim Jong Un think it’s time to intervene now.

Even major involvement by North Korean forces to stoke the Gwangju uprising, a bit later in May 1980 when Seoul’s streets were on fire, is a disputed theory put forward by Korean Military Academy loyalists.

They argue that Chun and his sidekick Roh Tae-woo, both proud graduates of the KMA and both of whom eventually became president, were too honorable to have oppressed the people of Gwangju the way those two and their special forces subordinates were and are alleged to have sparked the uprising by doing.

History as guidance has its limits. “We will have to see how much of the army follows the orders,” Sneider noted in an email before the martial law-enforcing soldiers stood down at the National Assembly. “This is not 1979 or 1980.”  

Moving on – and again giving Yoon the benefit of the doubt – note that, in the president’s justification for martial law, he tied North Korea to “anti-state” elements at home.

Yoon has been a major critic of pro-North elements he believes are seeking – with some success – to take over South Korea politically. We happen to agree that this is a serious problem, both for South Korea and for its allies. Asia Times has been warning about it for years.

However, it is not a new problem. Moon Jae-in’s five-year, noticeably pro-North presidency immediately preceded Yoon’s taking up residency in the Blue House. Kim Jong Un did not grab South Korea during that time.

If the problem has reached certifiable Fifth Column stage and needs to become recognized as an emergency that warrants installation of a new military dictatorship, we are not aware of the evidence.

One other aspect of this theme may be involved here. Very probably there was no tangibly increased North Korean threat. But it was an opportune time for Yoon to hint at one, as the whole world was aghast at the deployment of North Korean troops to Russia — allegedly, even to the Kursk frontline.

Oh, and maybe one further point: Yoon and the military may also have intended to pre-empt Trump from talking to his good buddy Kim again.

But what does all this not-quite-new background tell us about Yoon’s motivation for pulling the martial law stunt at this particular moment?

Here we must get into purely domestic politics. Yoon attempts to rule in the face of an opposition majority in parliament and is even feuding with his own party leader Han. The opposition wants to hamstring him with a restrictive budget and has all sorts of impeachment motions going along with accusations of corruption against his wife.

Meanwhile, apparently, the drill is to take a leaf out of ancient South Korean 1970s and 80s history, hype the North Korean threat and rule by decree. Yoon’s move may have seemed to have the possibility of success, as the president had stacked the military with hardline anti-North Korean loyalists. But the venture failed.

Where do we go from there in this argument? Deeper into domestic politics, probably. Stay tuned for that.

“This is an act of political suicide,” says Newsham. “Yoon did a shoot, ready, aim sort of thing. He’s right about pro-NK and pro-CCP elements in the opposition. But, man, this doesn’t look good. Hard to put the egg back together. If one is a chess player, not hard to think of a few parties that benefit from this turn of events.”

Uwe Parpart is publisher and editor-in-chief of Asia Times. Follow him on X @uwe_parpart

Associate Editor Bradley K. Martin covered the South Korean democratization movement, first for the Baltimore Sun and then for Newsweek. Follow him on X @bradleykmartin