South Korea martial law ‘came out of a clear blue sky’

CGTN Europe

Aidan Foster-Carter, a UK-based expert on Korea, says he never expected South Korea’s president to declare martial law – with soldiers and lawmakers facing off in the country’s parliament.

Transcript

00:00President Jun signed this decree of martial law. He did so out of a clear

00:06blue sky. This is not a society in which I think I or anybody else in, I'm some

00:11distance away but I follow it closely, or anybody there saw this coming. It's not,

00:16it's a country, it's a democratic country. Of course it has a history of military

00:20coups back from the 1960s through to 1987. It was ruled by soldiers but that

00:25was overthrown and it's been a robust democracy in several senses. It's been

00:29strong. It has been hard-fought. There's been a bit of an impasse lately because

00:34President Jun is frankly very unpopular. One might think he has no mandate at all

00:38to do such a thing. He's the most unpopular president ever. He won election

00:42very narrowly two years ago. He faces a parliament that's controlled, he's a

00:46conservative, he faces a parliament controlled by the left, by the liberals

00:51who increased their majority in parliamentary elections last year. So

00:55it's quite clear what the South Korean people want and he has no business

00:58calling them anti-state and pro-DPRK elements. There wasn't a crisis except

01:02that the parliament kept blocking, you know, there was a bit of a

01:06gridlock and certainly the two sides needed to talk and to compromise but

01:10that requires dialogue.

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