The historical traumas driving South Korea’s political turmoil

It is likely to become the defining image of the dramatic events of the last week in South Korea: a leather-jacketed opposition aide seizing the barrel of the rifle of a masked soldier who had been sent by the president to storm the country’s parliament.

“Let go!” Ahn Gwi-ryeong ordered the soldier. “Don’t you feel ashamed?”

Yoon Suk Yeol’s ill-fated attempt to introduce a state of martial law, which lasted just six hours from late on Tuesday night to early on Wednesday, was met with a rapid mobilisation by both the opposition and regular citizens who flooded to the National Assembly.

Allies of the president insist the hardline former prosecutor’s intention was merely to stage a spectacular act of political theatre, sending a message to opposition lawmakers he accuses of paralysing the state’s ability to function with a barrage of impeachment motions against his senior officials.

But according to the testimony of senior defence officials and members of his own party, Yoon’s intentions were very different: they say he deployed elite troops to the National Assembly with the explicit order to arrest lawmakers before they could vote to reject his martial law decree.

“If the troops had been a little bit faster, we would have backtracked about 50 years,” says Lee Dong-hyun, 60, a veteran of South Korea’s student pro-democracy protests in the 1980s.

While many South Koreans remain in shock about Yoon’s apparent coup attempt, the 63-year-old president managed to survive an impeachment vote on Saturday when members of his conservative People Power party boycotted the proceedings.

However, the PPP walkout is likely to prompt more protests in the coming days urging the president to resign. Some are also calling for his imprisonment — a fate already met by three of his seven predecessors elected since the country’s transition to democracy in the late 1980s.

The episode has triggered memories of dramatic events from the country’s recent past: a military coup in 1979 and subsequent massacre of protesting students in the south-western city of Gwangju; the years of demonstrations throughout the 1980s that precipitated the military regime’s demise; the mass “candlelight protests” in 2016-17 that led to the impeachment and eventual imprisonment of former conservative president Park Geun-hye.

“I was so stunned by his martial law decree that I couldn’t sleep at all last night,” says Kim Il-whan, a 72-year-old retiree standing in the bitter cold in central Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square, where in the 1980s soldiers and students used to fight pitched battles under clouds of tear gas. “I was so scared because his declaration of martial law reminded me of the Gwangju massacre.”

To much of the rest of the world, South Korea is one of the great economic and political success stories of the modern era. The country is more globally renowned for its vibrant popular culture and manufacturing prowess than for its traumatic past.

But the events of the last week have demonstrated how South Korea is still shaped by the particularly brutal period of dictatorship and the subsequent troubled transition to democracy in the 1980s.

Both the decision to try to impose martial law and the rapid response to the announcement were rooted in the political divisions, cold war rhetoric and personal experiences of those years.

Interviews with analysts, politicians and ordinary citizens reveal how memories of that period have shaped the actions of the protagonists in this latest Korean drama, from Yoon and his closest coterie of advisers to the commuters who rushed to the National Assembly on Tuesday night.

John Delury, an expert on Asian politics and visiting professor at Luiss University in Rome, says one of the decisive factors over the past week was how lawmakers, some of whom were student leaders against the dictatorship in the 1980s, instinctively “knew what to do” in the immediate aftermath of Yoon’s decree.

“They knew to get the hell over to the National Assembly immediately, to hold a vote, and to make sure the vote followed due process.”

“The way we express ourselves may be different [from the 1980s],” says Lee, the protest veteran. “But the fighting spirit has not changed.”

On October 26 1979, South Korea’s authoritarian leader Park Chung-hee was shot in the chest and head by Kim Jae-gyu, Park’s own chief of security and head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

Following the assassination of Park, the driving force behind South Korea’s economic model of state-directed capitalism, military leaders put a mid-ranking general called Chun Doo-hwan in charge of the investigation into the incident.

Chun promptly arrested the country’s military leadership on trumped-up charges of being involved in the assassination, seizing power and declaring martial law. Chun and his co-conspirators, members of a secret alumni network within the South Korean military, would go on to rule the country for the rest of the decade.

Jeongmin Kim, lead analyst at Seoul-based analysts Korea Pro, says that Chun’s coup and the regime’s subsequent crimes — most prominently the Gwangju massacre — still feature prominently in the South Korean imagination.

“The older generation cannot forget those days, while the younger generation are taught about them — not only what Chun did, but the fact that he and his co-conspirators would later be convicted of treason and go down in history as villains,” says Kim.

She notes that at Yonsei University, her alma mater, students still hold an annual commemoration for Lee Han-yeol, a Yonsei student who was fatally injured by a tear gas canister during a demonstration in 1987, the year South Korea began its democratic transition.

These weren’t professional protesters or opposition party members, they were ordinary guys mainly in their fifties who had been on their way home from work when they heard the news

As commuters rushed to the National Assembly following Yoon’s martial law declaration on Tuesday night, Kim noticed that older Koreans were taking the lead in organising the effort to protect lawmakers from the soldiers arriving in military helicopters.

“These weren’t professional protesters or opposition party members or trade unionists, they were ordinary guys mainly in their fifties who had been on their way home from work when they heard the news,” says Kim.

“But they were so organised, making sure people were safe, making sure people were protecting all the different exits, wearing earphones listening to live news updates so they always knew what was going on.”

“They also made constant references to the past,” she adds. “They were telling the police officers trying to stop people from entering that ‘this is a sin against history’, that anyone complicit in state crimes, like in the 1980s, would always have a black mark against their name.”

Delury says the events of the last week illustrated how “there is a generation of South Koreans who through the ’80s and ’90s worked to make sure it was actually going to be a civilian democracy”.

“Any middle-aged South Korean went through or caught the tail-end of a major fight against the military dictatorship,” says Delury. “They built a system as best they could to prevent exactly this, to prevent the president declaring martial law at midnight.”

Yoon himself has a complex relationship with the Chun regime and its legacy.

As a law student in Seoul, Yoon and his classmates held a mock trial for Chun during which they sentenced the general to life imprisonment. Yoon has described how following the mock trial, soldiers went to his home in Seoul, forcing him to take refuge at his grandparents’ house on the country’s east coast.

But as a politician, Yoon has at times appeared to praise Chun in an effort to appeal to his party’s conservative base.

“Parts of Chun’s acts were wrong, but many say he was good at politics aside from the military coup and [Gwangju massacre],” Yoon said while on the campaign trail in 2021, adding that Chun had appointed capable people who ensured that “state affairs ran smoothly”. He was later forced to apologise.

As president, Yoon has presented himself as a fierce proponent of liberal democracy, once using the word “freedom” 39 times in a single speech. But critics argue that his bruising political style, cold war worldview and background as a hardline prosecutor have long marked him out as an aspiring autocrat.

Many have described the language in Yoon’s announcement of martial law as strikingly old-fashioned and harsh, with its reference to opposition leaders as “pro-North Korea elements”, description of the National Assembly as a “den of criminals” and appeal to citizens “with a feeling of spitting blood”.

“I start doubting my ears when he uses these words from the past,” says Kim Hana, a 42-year-old Christian pastor attending an anti-Yoon demonstration on Gwanghwamun Square.

“He is trying to frame all Korean citizens as leftists and commies,” she adds. “He is trying to use the trauma of old Koreans, trampling on their efforts to democratise the country.”

But for many of Yoon’s remaining supporters, his message still holds appeal.

“Why should we impeach him? What is his wrongdoing? He lifted the martial law decree for the sake of the people because he doesn’t want to see the people bleed,” says YH Lee, a 64-year-old trader attending a pro-Yoon counter-demonstration nearby.

“Communists can’t defeat us — if they do, we will be a communist country under [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un’s control,” he adds. “The protesters calling for Yoon’s impeachment are evil. Communism is a failure, but they want to follow it.”

While those who warned of Yoon’s authoritarian tendencies appear vindicated by the events of the past week, many on the Korean right argue it is leftwing politicians who have used the country’s painful past for their own gain.

A former official in Yoon’s presidential administration argues that opposition leaders who have spent the past two years accusing Yoon of constructing a “prosecutorial dictatorship” were attempting to exploit the popular memory of past military regimes.

She notes that Democratic party leader Lee Jae-myung, the leading contender to succeed Yoon as president in the event of a successful impeachment, was indicted this year for his alleged role in a scheme to siphon millions of dollars to North Korea through a South Korean underwear manufacturer.

“By tarnishing all conservatives as a continuation of the military regime, they are trying to distract from their own legal issues and scandals,” she says. “They commit crimes, and then when they are prosecuted they act as martyrs for the democratic struggle.” The case has not yet gone to trial and Lee has denied any wrongdoing.

Jeongmin Kim, the analyst, says that while there have long been worrying signs of Yoon’s authoritarian tendencies, crude attempts by leftwing parties to paint him as a “dictator” from the very beginning of his presidency had turned off moderate voters.

“The irony is that because their rhetoric went too far, it made people less vigilant,” says Kim. “Now they are claiming to have been vindicated, but they bear some responsibility for the situation we find ourselves in.”

Many of us want to continue to support Yoon, not for his sake or his party’s sake, but because we don’t want the left to take power

The former Yoon administration official adds that South Korean conservatives have been “traumatised” by the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, daughter of the assassinated president, Park Chung-hee.

Park was impeached in 2017 and later imprisoned on charges of bribery and abuse of public office, after it emerged that Samsung chair Lee Jae-yong had spent millions of dollars funding the equestrian career of the daughter of Park’s longtime spiritual adviser. Park and Lee’s prosecution was actually overseen by Yoon, with the resulting prominence it gave him putting him on the path to the presidency.

The revelations of Park’s corruption triggered the “candlelight protests”, peaceful street demonstrations characterised by singing and the collective participation of civic groups including organisations representing everyone from gamers to mothers and care home residents — a far cry from the street battles of the 1980s.

Darcie Draudt-Véjares, an expert in South Korean politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the candlelight protests illustrated a “unique way of civil society mobilisation through networks that are still maintained from the democratisation period”.

Those networks were in evidence again on Saturday night, as hundreds of thousands of people gathered outside the national assembly to cheer on lawmakers voting for Yoon’s impeachment. While the vote failed to pass, the demonstrations will go on and are likely to build, marking the return of the Korean street as a force in the country’s politics.

But if the candlelight protests illustrated the democratic resilience of South Korean citizens, analysts note that Park’s impeachment also set a negative precedent for their elected representatives, with opposition parties launching constant impeachment motions against senior Yoon administration officials almost as soon as he was elected — one of the justifications he gave for declaring martial law.

The former Yoon official says that in 2017, many conservatives recognised Park’s wrongdoing and supported her impeachment. But she says they had since come to regret it, informing their decision to boycott the impeachment vote on Saturday night.

“Many of us want to continue to support Yoon, not for his sake or his party’s sake, but because we don’t want the left to take power and brand conservatism as ‘evil’, like they did last time,” she says.

Three days after Yoon’s martial law decree, she has barely slept. “All we need is a proper explanation as to why he did this.” She is fighting back tears. “I still believe President Yoon is a democrat at heart.”

Data visualisation by Keith Fray