In mass media reports the new President of the Republic of Korea is described as a conservative and the former Prosecutor-General, thus predicting the direction of his future course. To the author this image seems incomplete. In fact, the situation is more complicated, and a more detailed study of Yoon’s biography will allow us to predict his actions more accurately.
For example, it is known that Yoon was born on December 18, 1960 in a family of university professors. His father, Yoon Ki Joon, founded the Korean Statistical Society, and is now a full member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Korea. This conjures up the image of a boy from a well-off family, but this would have been the case if Yoon had been born 20 years ago. In South Korea, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the position of a university lecturer was mostly occupied by opposition-minded people who did not get into business or the civil service.
The next important point is the story of how even before the suppression of the Gwangju uprising in May 1980, Yoon, who had entered Seoul National University as a law student in 1979, took part in a mock trial of Chun Doo-hwan and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The story made a lot of noise. To escape retribution, Yoon fled to Gangneung City where his mother’s family lived, remained there for three months, and as this fact did not go unnoticed, he only managed to pass the bar exam on his ninth attempt in 1991. The pro-Moon authors like to talk about this, alluding to his stupidity, but there were obvious political reasons for this story.
Yoon was discharged from the military service in 1982 because of anisometropia. This is a serious eye disease which manifests itself in a significant difference in refraction between the left and right eyes, and it may also be the reason why Yoon often looks away during debates or interviews. Of course, democrats wrote it off as arrogance, reminding the author how anti-Pyongyang propaganda passed off the Kim family’s diabetes-related problems as the aftermath of rampant gluttony.
It is usually remembered that Yoon was the man who put two presidents in jail, but this is by no means a complete list of the high-profile cases in which Yoon has been involved. However, much of it was politically motivated, which is why Yoon could not boast of high-profile arrests, as he quite often found himself in the role of a prosecutor going against the system.
However, it cannot be said that Yoon has fought exclusively against conservatives. He was investigating Ahn Hee-jung in 2003. Yes, the same governor who was Moon Jae-in’s main rival in the inner-party primaries and, some time later, the first senior Korean politician to eventually receive a prison sentence for systematically raping his secretary. Although the trial court acquitted him, the reaction of feminists and the “women’s street” combined with the desire of the Blue House resulted in the court “taking into account the opinion of the people.”
But Ahn was then an aide to President Roh Moo-hyun and was accused of a classic corruption scheme for a party official of that rank: receiving 1.1 billion won in illegal financial donations from the business community. Despite the fact that Ahn was not arrested until December 14, 2003, and the leftist press noted that in a bid to prove the corruption of a presidential aide, prosecutors had collected all charges ever brought against Ahn, even though most of them had previously been dismissed by the courts for lack of evidence, it was Yoon who found evidence that could not be dismissed as fabricated.
The “state officials gone trolls” case is even more famous. It involved the National Intelligence Service ordering its personnel to manipulate the public opinion against Moon Jae-in. It was the violation of not only the Election of Public Officials Act, but also the Neutrality of Intelligence Services Act. Besides, despite the existence of a “passport-based internet” in Korea, intelligence agents used fake accounts of Korean citizens.
In 2013, Yoon Suk-yeol headed the special investigation team into this case and tried to put Intelligence Chief Won Se-hoon in jail, but faced very stiff opposition from the intelligence community, the government and the conservative media. As a result, in September 2013 the conservative newspaper Chosun Ilbo published a compromising information from the secret services on the then Prosecutor-General. He was found to have a son out of wedlock, and was forced to resign. Yoon was also demoted and transferred from Seoul to Daegu and Daejeon Prosecutors’ offices.
During these corporate wars Yoon was the first to openly accuse the then Justice Minister Hwang Kyo-Ahn, who was then Prime Minister, one of the organisers of Park Geun-hye’s impeachment and leader of the conservative party, of interfering in the investigation. Even later, he turned out to be one of Yoon’s rivals in the power struggle within the People’s Power Party.
Besides, Yoon repeatedly investigated the corrupt activities of a number of leaders of financial and industrial groups. Back in 2006 Yoon is believed to have helped arrest the then Chairman of Hyundai Motor Group Jeong Mong-gu on charges of bribery and embezzlement of subsidiary assets for creation of funds to secure bribes and finance the lobby groups in the Government.
In 2008 Yoon worked for an independent legal team investigating the manipulation with the BBK share price, involving President Lee Myung-bak.
Later on, Yoon investigated the case of Chey Tae-won, the Chairman of the SK Group, over allegations of his embezzlement of tens of billions of Wons from the group affiliates. The investigation led to Chey’s arrest in court in January 2013, and an eventual sentence of four years in prison.
In 2016-2017, Yoon played a key role in winning proceedings related to former President Park Geun-hye and Samsung Group’s de facto leader, Lee Jae-yong. The Vice Chairman of Samsung Electronics Co. was eventually arrested in February 2017 for handing over tens of millions of dollars in bribes to presidential confidante Choi Soon-sil in exchange for the government’s support of the merger of two Samsung subsidiaries in 2015.
Yoon’s long career of tracing corrupt business executives has earned him the nickname the “Grim Reaper.” While none of the Chaebols (Korean for “a rich family”), imprisoned by Yoon, served their time to the end, the mere fact that Prosecutor Yoon was able to gather enough evidence and overcome the resistance of the system speaks volumes about his personal qualities. It should also be noted that Yoon, unlike his colleagues, did not have the well-known reputation of a “prosecutor for hire” who faces the task of putting someone in jail and “works off the order” by finding the right evidence.
In 2016, Yoon Suk-yeol headed a special investigation into the corruption scandal involving President Park Geun-hye that led to her impeachment. Unfortunately, what exactly Yoon found among the allegations against Park Geun-hye or Lee Myung-bak remains a secret of the investigation, so we cannot say with 100% certainty that such and such evidence appeared in the verdict thanks to him. However, it is believed that it was Yoon who unveiled the details of the commercial relationship between the Choi Soon-sil Foundations and Samsung Corporation.
On May 19, 2017 newly elected President Moon Jae-in appointed Yoon Head of the Seoul Central District Prosecutor’s Office. In this capacity Yoon charged former presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, three former heads of the National Intelligence Service (Won Se-hun and his successors), former Chief Justice Yang Seong-tae and more than 100 other former officials and business executives.
On June 17, 2019 Yoon was appointed Prosecutor-General, although during the parliamentary debates the right and the centre-right members opposed it, and the left members approved his candidacy. But by the autumn the “fuss over Cho Guk” had already begun, and from the following year a war with Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae who eventually removed Yoon from office on November 24, 2020, citing alleged ethics violations, power abuse and interference in the investigations against his associates and family members.
On December 24, following an injunction filed with the Seoul Administrative Court, the dismissal was overturned, but Yoon Suk-yeol resigned on March 4, 2021.
On June 29, 2021, Yoon officially stood as a candidate for the 2022 presidential election, he registered as an independent candidate on July 12 and officially joined the People’s Power Party on July 30. On November 5, 2021, Yoon Suk-yeol won 47.85% of the vote in the inner-party election and became president on March 9, 2022.
The author finds important the fact that Yoon did not join the conservatives immediately, and it was not his personal political views that played the main role, but the general laws of his political culture. There is no third force in South Korea that can siphon off votes from dissatisfied conservatives and liberals alike. If Yoon went to the polls separately and the Conservatives separately, the opposition camp to Moon would be split and the Democrat representative would score less than the two of them, but more individually than each of them.
Therefore, Yoon had to unite with the Conservatives, but that had its price. One cannot be the frontman of the conservative camp and not voice the attitudes obligatory for a representative of this political trend. Otherwise, supporters of Park Geun-hye and Lee Myung-bak (and classical conservatives in general) will be happy to put sticks in the wheels of all his endeavours in general. Hence, Yoon is forced to play complex political games in which supporting a particular thesis can strengthen his influence with one faction but spoil relations with another.
It can also be noted that Yoon is not considered a professional politician, which is both his strength and weakness. On the one hand, he is not closed-minded, is not affiliated to any political group and is not obliged to play by accepted rules. On the other hand, his ignorance of certain issues could lead to a dependence on those who do. A significant number of people are Yoon’s political and economic advisers, and are highly likely to take up positions in the government when Yoon comes to power.
Summary:
- Judging from his background Yoon is seen as a typical representative of the “586 generation”. He comes from a family of university professors, where those dissatisfied with the regime went at the time, took part (according to one of the versions of the organization) in a mock trial of Chun Doo-hwan in 1980, has experience in confronting the authorities and chaebol with the serious list of those already convicted or partly convicted…
- Although Yoon was well within the left wing, the anti-corruption trend in his activity and the black-and-white logic of South Korean factional struggle dragged him to the right. Had it not been for the peculiarities of ROK’s political culture, Yoon would not have become a representative of the conservatives, and his agenda minus his notions of justice, might have been different.
- As someone who investigated political corruption cases, Yoon knows well the political kitchen where he now will have to cook. There are no illusions there. But it also means that traditional politicians feel VERY uncomfortable with him regardless of the camp.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of the Far East at the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
