South Korea dispels grave threat

With 12,000 North Korean troops fighting alongside Russian forces seeking to destroy Ukraine’s independence, the last thing the Indo-Pacific region needs is instability in South Korea, a bulwark of pro-Western democracy in our region. But that has occurred after a night of madness in Seoul when hardline conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol – acting, he said, to protect his country from “North Korea’s communist forces” – imposed emergency martial law with no apparent justification beyond his personal political problems.

As pro-democracy demonstrators swarmed into the streets, South Korea’s National Assembly immediately voted 190-0 to terminate the declaration. Six hours after he made it, at 4.30am local time, Mr Yoon was back on national television announcing he had rescinded it and ordered troops back to barracks.

What happens next is anyone’s bet. With even the leader of his ruling People Power Party denouncing him, there is talk of Mr Yoon being impeached. He deserves no less for seeking to overturn the institutions that have turned South Korea from an impoverished basket case at the time of the Korean War armistice in 1953 to a vital democracy and economic success story.

When military and economic co-operation between Pyongyang’s treacherous militarist regime and the dictatorships in Moscow and Beijing is intensifying – seen in Vladimir Putin’s SOS for North Korean help in Ukraine – South Korea valiantly has held the Cold War line against the Kim dynasty north of the demilitarised zone along the 38th parallel, the powder keg that divides the two Koreas. Seoul’s ability to do so has been built on its transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s. Its people, once poorer than Egypt’s, are now as rich as Europe’s. Its technological know-how is second to none; its cars and container ships sell around the world. Its freedoms and democratic institutions, like Japan’s, have become an indispensable bulwark against the malign strategic ambitions of Kim Jong-un, Putin and Xi Jinping, particularly in our region.

Yet Mr Yoon, it seems, was prepared to put those freedoms at risk by imposing a martial law regime that banned all political activity, submitted the country’s vibrant media to military control and banned strikes. His irrational action fits with reports that, after never holding a golf club in his life, he is desperately trying to learn to play the game to impress Donald Trump.

South Korea’s democracy and its regional allies, especially Australia, Japan and the US, deserve better. Mr Yoon’s attempts to justify his attempt to bring down democracy look to be specious and plain stupid, a clumsy attempt to overcome the deep trouble he is in following the crushing defeat of his party in legislative elections last April.

The opposition-led National Assembly (described by Mr Yoon as a “den of criminals” and “a monster that collapses the liberal democracy system”) has been at loggerheads with him over politicians’ plans for budget cuts. A string of scandals surrounding Mr Yoon’s wife, Kim Keon-hee, has been getting sensational media coverage with claims of influence peddling, stock manipulation and accepting luxury Dior handbags. With Mr Yoon’s approval rating in the low 20s, repeated attempts to impeach him have added to his anger.

South Korea’s democratic institutions forced Mr Yoon to back down. The DMZ between the Koreas is in fact one of the world’s most heavily militarised zones. Signs of disarray in the South could provoke a reckless response from Kim Jong-un’s lunatic regime in Pyongyang. That is what Mr Yoon risked. But the National Assembly’s response suggests the culture of democracy has become embedded in a country of immense strategic importance.