December was a month like no different for South Korea.
Because the journalist and film-maker Haeryun Kang explains, she was in her pyjamas and able to go to mattress on the night time of three December when – seemingly out of nowhere – the nation’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, went on nationwide TV to declare martial legislation. It was obligatory, the president argued, to save lots of the nation from North Korean sympathisers and communists who had infiltrated the opposition.
It was, the journalist Raphael Rashid argues, a tactic straight from South Korea’s previous – guilty any dissent on an imagined enemy inside. This time, nonetheless, it failed virtually as quickly because it had began. Outraged politicians from the opposition and Yoon’s personal occasion arrived on the nationwide meeting inside hours to reverse the declaration.
The turmoil has continued, with the impeachment not solely of Yoon but additionally his speedy successor, adopted by a devastating airplane crash at Muan airport on 29 December – the worst ever on South Korean soil – during which 179 folks died.
As Helen Pidd hears, with Yoon holed up in his residence looking for to keep away from arrest and the nation nonetheless grieving the lifeless from the Muan catastrophe, many South Koreans are struggling to think about what may come subsequent.
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