Sth Korea’s ‘cult leader’ Yoon Suk Yeol faces a full on raid: how did it come to this?

Helicopters, bulldozers and up to 2000 police may be deployed to extract Yoon Suk Yeol from the palace where he has gone to ground with his ultra-loyal Praetorian Guard of security officers.

If it were anywhere else, the compound fortified with barbed wire and armed men to protect its occupant from arrest by the authorities would be that of a cult leader whom the government had decided to bring down.

In South Korea’s complex politics, the “cult leader” is the president. The stand-off is the result of a potentially violent argument about whether police can constitutionally detain him on suspicion of insurrection.

On one side were officials from the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO), an admired body empowered to clean up a democratic system with a history of too-close ties between business leaders and politicians.

Impeached South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol is holed up inside the presidential palace.

On the other is the presidential security service, which is determined to stop the CIO from seizing Yoon Suk Yeol, the impeached president who provoked fury last month by trying to declare martial law and then reversing his decision six hours later.

The stand-off on Wednesday led the acting president, the deputy prime minister Choi Sang-mok, to make an unusual plea to his two government law enforcement agencies: “please do your best” to avoid inflicting physical harm on each other.

The scenes in Hannam-dong, the Mayfair of Seoul where wealthy South Koreans live close to the city centre, derive from that martial law declaration in early December. After it failed, Yoon was impeached, as was his interim replacement, the prime minister, Han Duck-soo.

The CIO went further, ordering Yoon’s arrest on grounds of insurrection. But when its agents and the police arrived at the presidential compound in Hannam-dong last Friday, they found the presidential security service – along with hundreds of pro-Yoon protesters – waiting to drive them away.

On Tuesday this week, armed with a newly extended arrest warrant, the CIO said it was preparing to try again.

“We will do our best to accomplish our goal by thoroughly preparing this time with great determination that the second warrant execution will be the last,” its head, Oh Dong-woon, told a committee of the National Assembly, which is controlled by the left-wing opposition. He apologised for Friday’s failure.

On Wednesday, the protesters gathered again: pro-Yoon on the side of the compound, some with American flags and signs saying “Make Korea Great Again”. Yoon is a Conservative, and his fate has opened a divide in South Korean politics between older voters with hardline views on North Korea, supported by some nationalist young men, and more liberal middle-aged and younger women on the other side.

Fittingly, in that context, the hundreds of anti-Yoon protesters calling for his arrest deployed the sort of light sticks waved by fans at K-pop concerts.

According to local newspaper reports, the CIO were gearing up for a far more concerted effort to arrest Yoon this time.

Although the precise plans have not been revealed, they are said to rely on an increase in numbers – 30 agents and 100 police officers – along with the use of helicopters and special forces, summoning the prospect of a full-scale armed raid.

Another option would be to use bulldozers to break down the barricades, with 2,000 police then physically removing the presidential guards.

Thousands of Yoon Suk Yeol’s supporters are camped outside his residence in Seoul. Picture: AFP.

The guards, meanwhile, have also built up their defences, using buses to block off the entrance to the compound and installing barbed wire.

All this in a villa that was once a Ministry of Defence building. One of Yoon’s more unconventional acts, of the sort which had him compared to populist leaders in America and Europe, was to close down the Blue House, the traditional presidential residence, in favour of this villa.

Yoon’s lawyers say he believes in the rule of law and would answer a court summons if it were issued legally. They and the presidential security service say the CIO, whose remit is corruption, is not empowered to ask for an arrest warrant for insurrection.

His team also denied reports that the whole stand-off was pointless because Yoon and his wife had secretly escaped from the residence and were no longer there.

“I want to clarify that I personally saw him at the residence yesterday,” Yoon Kab-keun, one of his lawyers, said.

The Times