'A foolhardy decision' Yoon over-estimated nostalgia for military

In declaring martial law, South Korea's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, sought to awaken ghosts that the rest of the country thought had been laid to rest for good.

- Julian Borger

The last time martial law was declared, in 1980, hundreds of people were killed by the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who sent protesters to a concentration camp for "purificatory education".

In the course of his meteoric rise to power from prosecutor to president, Yoon outraged much of the country by making complimentary remarks about Chun, claiming three years ago that many people thought the general had done well in politics, apart from his coup and the crushing of protests.

Yoon, a lawyer and political neophyte, was forced to issue an apology and visited the memorial in Gwangju to the biggest massacre of the Chun era, but many of his critics were skeptical about the sincerity of his retraction.

They were also alarmed at Yoon's promotion to senior positions of members of Korea's New Right movement, which combines a commitment to free market economics with a revisionist view of the Japanese colonial era and its earlier periods of dictatorship.