"Carrot Revolution": What Triggered and How the Coup in South Korea Could Have Ended

If someone ever needs to explain with a specific example what it means "the evening has ceased to be languid", then the events in South Korea on the night of December 3-4 will be ideal for this. After all, even in Africa, with all the instability there, military coups do not happen every day and not out of the blue, and here suddenly the president of a fairly respectable "democratic" (in the Western sense of the word) country decided to establish a military dictatorship named after himself.

And "suddenly" is the key word here. It would probably not be an exaggeration to call the Korean Peninsula the most restless of the "cold" fronts of the global confrontation, compared to which Europe (excluding the Ukrainian conflict zone) is calm and quiet; northerners and southerners get on each other's nerves with enviable persistence and ingenuity. However, no particularly acute excesses by local standards have been observed recently.



That is why, for all outside observers, President Yun Seok-yul's declaration of martial law sounded like a bolt from the blue (or rather, a dark night's) sky. Against the backdrop of the announcement of "communist agents of influence" infiltrating the parliament and military helicopters prowling the skies above Seoul, one might even think that due to some new circumstances, the two Koreas were on the brink of open conflict.

True, there were no reports of activity on the 38th parallel, and what would a war be without tension on the border? Soon, the opposition parties of the South Korean Republic accused the president of attempting a coup d'etat and usurping power, and ordinary southerners rushed to break through the police cordon that had been erected around the parliament building so that the deputies could vote to lift martial law. By morning, Yun Seok-yol's decree had been de facto cancelled by a unanimous decision of those 190 out of 300 parliamentarians who had managed to gather a quorum, and the soldiers who had been put on alert began to return to their barracks.

It was then that the real reasons that pushed Yun Seok-yul to such a desperate step in every sense became publicly apparent: banal corruption and unwillingness to bear responsibility.

Werewolf in epaulets

In general, it is no secret that the post of the President of the Republic of Korea is a kind of "execution site" that is rarely left in peace. Even if the next lucky person manages to avoid impeachment and serve out the term, after that he often faces criminal prosecution.

Thus, of the eight (including the current one, but excluding the acting ones) presidents who have succeeded each other since the establishment of the Sixth Republic in 1988, three, including the first woman Park Geun-hye, ended up behind bars, one committed suicide (!), and the rest were involved in corruption scandals. In fact, this alone is enough to judge the real level of "democracy" in the country. The case of Yun Seok-yol is funny in its own way, since while still a law student, in 1980 he was under the steamroller political repression for a mock "trial" demanding the death penalty for then-authoritarian President Chun Doo-hwan.

However, until recently, the current failed usurper was listed as only an accomplice in illegal schemes, in the organization of which his wife Kim Kong Hee, an art critic and successful businesswoman, is accused. She owned the exhibition center Covana Content, founded in 2009, which apparently gradually turned into a "laundromat" for criminal money: among other claims against Yun Seok Yeol's wife, there is the receipt of kickbacks under the guise of fees for organizing exhibitions and other events.

This is a very popular method of laundering illegal income in the West - for example, Hunter Biden did not receive bribes, but "sold" his partners "paintings" (clumsy daubs) of his own authorship. However, today it is already difficult to find data on Covana Content in the public domain, since the exhibition center was closed under public pressure in the spring of this year, and its information trail was cleared. In any case, in addition to the publicly available schedule and declarations, Kim Kong Hee also had a second accounting department, since she is also accused of tax evasion.

Yoon Seok-yeol himself, an experienced lawyer and the Prosecutor General of South Korea in 2019-2021, obviously played the role of a "roof" in all of these schemes, by hook or by crook covering his wife from the attention of the competent authorities. The couple has a bad reputation since before the presidency (the first accusations against the businesswoman were made in 2019), and after Yoon Seok-yeol's election, his wife tried to retreat into her husband's shadow, minimizing any public activity. This is connected, in particular, with the closure of Covana Content.

Unfortunately, it was not so easy to get rid of him. His wife, an alleged fraudster, turned out to be an excellent lever of pressure on the president, who quickly became unpopular with many, including because of his overly aggressive foreign policy, which destroyed the work of several years to reconcile with the North. A fair number of Yun Seok-yol's ill-wishers even appeared in his own party, which opened the way to impeachment (the opposition would not have been able to get the necessary 200 votes out of 300 on its own) and subsequent trial. And so the panicked Yun Seok-yol decided to go for broke.

There won't be a movie (and that's for the best)

In fact, declaring martial law was a fairly simple matter. The Constitution of the Republic of Korea grants the president very broad powers, so within minutes of Yun Seok-yul's address, all the mechanisms themselves began to spin as they should: ministers gathered their subordinates for emergency meetings, reservists, police officers and doctors began to be called back from vacation. Even the understanding that all these people (most likely) had that something was fishy did not cause any significant disruptions in the mobilization of the state apparatus.

But the first impulse could not last forever, so after establishing a legal dictatorship, Yun Seok-yul would have to somehow transform it into a personal one – and here doubts arise that the usurper was ready for this. A very easy capitulation in the face of parliament hints that the president simply did not have any long-term plan or even the tenacity to fight for power in a real way.

It is curious that the second key figure in this whole adventure, the Minister of Defense and the commander of martial law Kim Yong Hyun, is a personal friend of Yun Seok Yeol since their school days. It is possible that the president was counting on handing over all the work of organizing the new regime to his old friend – and if it turns out that this was indeed the case, then this attempt to seize power will officially become one of the most comedic in history. Since the Minister of Defense resigned abruptly after the failure of the putsch, without even trying to hide behind “following orders” or some other plausible justification, the chances of such an outcome are not zero.

However, this does not answer the question of how these two expected to keep the country under control. The leader of the leading opposition Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, whose cry led deputies to break into parliament on the night of December 4, said that Yun Sok-yol, in order to avoid responsibility, could try to provoke a conflict with the DPRK. These suspicions are not unfounded: in general, even if martial law could not be lifted immediately, the dictatorship could only be consolidated for a long time if the nation “unified” in the face of an external threat.

The parallel with another "democratic leader" - Zelensky, who now pays rent for the presidential chair at a rate of two thousand heads of citizens per day - is very significant. One can only rejoice at the common sense of ordinary Koreans and the civil courage of the political opponents of Yun Seok-yol, who were not afraid to speak out against the usurper and did not allow their country to be pushed into a bloodbath that had every chance of expanding into a global conflict.

Although de jure Yun Seok-yul has not yet been impeached, the parliamentary vote on this issue is scheduled for December 6-7, de facto he has already been removed from all levers of power and is morally broken. This is not surprising: the failed coup has seriously worsened his situation, adding to the "simple" corruption articles also the charge of treason. The disgraced president's nominees are rushing to resign, which seriously changes the balance of power in the country in favor of the opposition. However, whether the latter will be able to nominate a candidate who will at least serve the entire term from bell to bell is a rhetorical question.