Arrest standoff shows defiance of impeached South Korean president
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Yoon Suk Yeoul has vowed to ‘fight to the end’ as he resists attempts to hold him accountable amid political crisis. South Korean anti-corruption officials attempting to arrest the country’s suspended president, Yoon Suk Yeol, must know by now what he meant by his repeated vows to “fight to the end”.
In the month since his calamitous declaration of martial law, Yoon, along with most of his party, his legal team and, crucially, his security detail, have resisted at every turn attempts to hold him politically and legally accountable. On Friday, after a tense standoff between anti-corruption officials and security staff assigned to Yoon, South Korea’s gravest political crisis in decades rumbled on, the day closing with another cliffhanger worthy of one of the country’s wildly popular TV dramas.
No one who has followed the turmoil in recent weeks could have guessed how Friday’s visit by 100 officials and police officers would play out. Almost six hours after the attempted arrest began, it ended with Yoon still ensconced in his official residence and not staring at the walls of a cell in Seoul’s detention centre.
Yoon is responding to a political crisis of his making with the same qualities he used to confront striking doctors and resist calls for an investigation into scandals surrounding his wife, Kim Keon Hee – with a defiance that borders on arrogance. This, after all, is the same man who rejected calls – including those from political allies – to immediately lift martial law after it was imposed late in the evening of 3 December. It was only after opposition MPs grappled with armed troops and scaled walls into the national assembly building to vote down his edict that he finally relented.
