South Korea impeachment sparks revelations of president’s warmongering

South Korea’s impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol faces mounting popular, political and legal pressure as more details emerge about his Dec. 3 declaration of martial law. The South Korean police and the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO) are currently renewing their efforts to detain Yoon after the presidential security service prevented his arrest in a six-hour standoff on Jan. 3.

Revelations have shed light on some of the potential motivations and plans for President Yoon’s martial law declaration. The move may have been part of an attempt to start a hot war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea.) In a Dec. 13 article, Ju-Hyun Park, an organizer with Nodutdol, the anti-imperialist organization of Koreans of the diaspora living in the U.S. or Canada, wrote:

“Citing anonymous military sources, lawmaker Kim Byung-joo, a former four-star general … told fellow lawmakers on December 10 that 20 members of the Special Forces’ Headquarters Intelligence Detachment (HID) unit ‘were on standby at a location in Seoul’ on the night of the martial law order. Kim [Byung-joo] claims the HID unit would have been mobilized to the National Assembly to arrest lawmakers, and questions whether they would have killed those who resisted, possibly while wearing fake North Korean uniforms. … 

“On December 13, influential independent journalist Kim Eo-jun appeared before the National Assembly with a bombshell claim. According to Kim [Eo-jun], whose studio was targeted by the military in the early hours of the coup attempt, a source from ‘the embassy of an allied country’ told him Yoon planned to assassinate Han Dong-Hoon, the leader of the president’s ruling party, on the night of the martial law order. 

False flag operation?

“Kim Eo-jun claimed Special Forces in North Korean uniform were to act as an ‘assassination squad’ undertaking the following plot: ‘First, Han Dong-hoon is to be assassinated during transportation after his arrest. Second, attack the arrest unit escorting Cho Kuk, Yang Jeong-cheol and myself, pretending to rescue them. Third, North Korean military uniforms will be buried at a specific location. Fourth, after some time, the uniforms will be discovered, and the incident will be attributed to North Korea.’”

Cho Kuk is an anti-Yoon politician who leads the minority Rebuilding Korea Party, and Yang Jeong-cheol is an influential former aide of former President Moon Jae-in. 

Ju-Hyun Park added: “Kim Eo-jun also said he received tips that Yoon planned to ‘kill American soldiers to induce the U.S. to bomb North Korea,’ and that a biochemical terror attack had also been under consideration. Yoon would have thereby manufactured a situation from which he could emerge as the ‘reunification president’ who successfully ended Korea’s division by means of conquest.” (People’s Dispatch Dec. 13)

South Korean politics has been plunged into chaos since Dec. 3, with several members of President Yoon’s inner circle having resigned, and some have been detained by the CIO. In addition, the National Assembly voted Dec. 27 to impeach the acting president, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo.

The people of South Korea organized mass protests to block the initial martial law declaration and continued them during the subsequent political turmoil. Hundreds gathered outside of President Yoon’s residence Jan. 4, calling for his ouster and arrest.

A pattern of U.S. colonial manipulation

These recent dramatic events are just the latest in a well-established pattern in South Korean politics, with roots in the U.S. military occupation and its role as neocolonialist power in South Korea. 

In a Jan. 3 interview, independent Korean-American journalist and geopolitical analyst KJ Noh stated: “This is the cycle where the United States puts in a dictator, the Koreans overthrow the dictator, and the United States puts in another one. This happened in 1948, 1960, 1972, 1979, 1980, 1987, 2015, and here we go again. 

“Yoon Suk Yeol was Washington’s man in Seoul. Nobody that I know of had any respect for him as a politician. He’s a person who had never held elected office in his life, until suddenly he became the American favorite, because his foreign policy was the exact mirror-image of U.S. foreign policy for Asia. It was a direct clone of the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy. … 

“When he became the President, he said he would turn this into the republic of prosecution, which is what he did. He was prosecuting unions; he was prosecuting peace organizations; he was prosecuting workers; the media; any and everybody; civil society itself. He was trampling it underfoot.  And the U.S. was just continuing to praise him and saying, ‘This man is the leader of a global pivot state which is leading the fight of democracies over autocracies.’ And the next thing you know, he has declared himself the dictator of South Korea by declaring martial law. … 

“[T]he United States has operational control over South Korea’s military the moment it declares DEFCON-3, or preparation for war. So, if we have a situation where the U.S.-favored president declares martial law, uses the pretext of war with North Korea as the justification for martial law, then what happens is South Korea’s 500,000 troops, plus potentially 3.1 million reserve troops, fall immediately under U.S. operation control. 

“In other words, we have a situation which primes the entire peninsula for war against China and also creates tremendous moral hazard for this escalation to war.” (youtube.com/watch?v=YtjBjMhjglk)