South Korean President Yoon’s Arrest Could Backfire on Opposition

North Korea claims Seoul on the verge of collapse

By: Shim Jae Hoon

South Korea’s political crisis has deepened with the arrest of President Yoon Suk Yeol by the Corruption Investigation Agency, after weeks of siege on the presidential compound in the heart of Seoul. After defying arrest on mutiny and sedition charges for illegally declaring martial law on the night of December 3, Yoon allowed police inside his compound to arrest him and take him for questioning by the corruption investigation agency, whose authority he disputes.

With the opposition Democratic Party controlling the parliament, it appears certain that Yoon will undergo a long period of harsh questioning lasting for weeks if not months. The opposition party leader, Lee Jae Myung, hopes to keep up the police questioning as long as possible to enable him to use the affair to campaign for the next presidential election, which is expected to follow confirmation of Yoon’s impeachment.

Meanwhile, the political impact on the economy is becoming more evident by the day, with the Korean won sagging in value from W1,420 per US dollar before the crisis to W1,459.69 today. Foreign investors have divested Korean government bonds, while small businesses complain about falling consumption caused by street demonstrations. A recent disaster involving a jetliner crash that killed 179 passengers and crew at South Korea’s Muan airport has provoked mass cancellation of yearend overseas vacations.

Death penalty possible

A former prosecutor who led the conservative People Power Party to victory in 2022 to the relief of international allies concerned about North Korean and Chinese adventurism, Yoon could face the death penalty or life in jail if found guilty, thus joining a long list of South Korean heads of state, most of whom never managed to survive their given terms. Yoon, however, is the first to be detained while in office. The nation’s founding president Dr Syngman Rhee was ousted from office and exiled by the student revolution in 1960, and Park Chung Hee, who came to power by coup d’etat and ruled as a dictator, was assassinated in 1979 at the end of 18 years in office. Human rights campaigner Kim Dae Jung and democracy fighter Kim Young Sam are the only two who managed to finish their terms in office. Park Keun Hye, Park Chung Hee’s daughter, was impeached on corruption charges and removed from office.

International and regional concerns are that the affair leaves South Korea basically leaderless just five days before the country’s patron state and protector the United States, with 24,234 active-duty troops in the country on nine major bases, hands over government to returning President Donald Trump, who has shown deep aversion to overseas entanglements, with an untried secretary of state to replace Antony Blinken, who visited last week to attempt to resolve the crisis.

That raises the possibility of the collapse of the trilateral security arrangement painfully fashioned by the Biden administration by getting Japan and South Korea together in the face of decades of lingering hostility left over from Japan’s World War II colonialism. Tokyo is deeply concerned. To get a first-hand look at the situation, Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya became the first Japanese top diplomat to visit South Korea in nearly seven years on January 13 to discuss the situation.

The country’s democratic process has never been easy. Yoon’s declaration of martial law, he claimed, was to deal with an unruly opposition majority blocking normal operation of the National Assembly, the nation’s parliament, controlling the majority with help from splinter groups to obstruct his fiscal budget bill and the administration’s appointments.

Democratic Party’s problems

The Democratic Party has its own serious problems, with its leader Lee Jae Myung facing multiple scandals involving a variety of charges ranging from election law violation to embezzlement running into billions of Korean won involving kickbacks from housing projects he is reported to have approved while he was Seongnam City mayor. He is facing three other trials involving a businessman illegally paying North Korea US$8 million on his behalf to get him invited by the North Korean regime to help embellish his credentials as a potential presidential candidate.

It was frustration with this obstructionism, Yoon’s allies say, that triggered the short-tempered former public prosecuting attorney with relatively short political experience and a shorter fuse, to announce martial law. Yoon’s lawyers have vowed to bring the DP’s obstructionism to the attention of the court as a way of justifying his coup.

As Yoon was being led away by a huge police force that surrounded his presidential compound for weeks, his governing party declared the arrest was illegal, as the warrant had been issued not by a judicial authority but by the Anti-Corruption Agency. For days, Yoon has insisted that he was prepared to testify before the Constitutional Court, which is hearing his impeachment, not by the ACA which he said was not qualified to question him. The agency had been created by the previous Democratic Party government to replace the prosecution, which it claimed was biased against the Democrats.

Yoon said he was allowing the police to seize him “in order to avoid bloodshed.” The confrontation between 1,000 armed police surrounding the presidential compound and an armed military detachment inside was threatening to develop into a shootout. That danger has now been avoided with Yoon’s surrender, but the Democratic Party faces growing public accusations that its main aim was to detain the president, not to investigate him rather than seeking a fair investigation or court hearings on Yoon’s alleged crime.

“His crime of sedition is serious enough to warrant a criminal indictment, apart from the constitutional court’s hearings,” said Rep. Jung Chung Rae, the party’s hardline judiciary committee chairman. “We think he deserves a death sentence for his crime,”

According to the ruling party’s statements, Lee also has an ulterior reason for wanting to speed up Yoon’s interrogation at the criminal court to use information gained for the coming election campaign. Lee himself is already fighting for a second court hearing for which, if he is convicted, he could be prevented from running for office for the next 10 years.