South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye was removed from office Friday, local time, when the country’s Constitutional Court upheld a vote of the National Assembly to impeach her.
“I wholeheartedly offer words of apology to the people as my lack of virtue and carelessness have caused great confusion at a time when the nation faces challenges over national security and the economy,” she had said after the Assembly impeached her in December when she was preparing for the court review.
By the time the country’s high court got around to ratifying the judgment of the Republic of Korea’s parliament, Park was deeply unpopular. She was essentially a lame duck who hoped to serve out the duration of her term, ending next February.
She was felled by a domestic scandal involving corruption, bribery and cronyism, but as hinted in her words, her absence may have a much bigger impact in the wider world of diplomacy.
Park was the ROK’s first democratically elected leader to be forced from office and also the daughter of the former unelected president and general Park Chung-hee, who ruled the country from 1961 until his assasination in 1979 by the head of his own security services.
Gen. Park had survived two assasination attempts previously. These were likely sponsored by North Korea, which was in a state of constant Cold War with the South since America partitioned the peninusla at the end of the Korean war in 1953.
Her mother Yuck Young-soo met a bad end as well. She was killed in a theater in 1974 by a sympathizer of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
So it came as no surprise that Park herself showed little sympathy for the belligerent communist regime. She responded to the North’s tests of bombs and missiles by undiplomatically speaking of the likely “regime collapse” ahead for strongman Kim Jong-un.
“It is unusual,” the AP report at the time deadpanned, “for a South Korean official to touch upon such a government collapse in North Korea.”
Park proceeded to push for punishing sanctions against North Korea by the United Nations and various member countries, and got them.
North Korea responded by test-firing still more missiles. The hermit kingdon’s perhaps inaptly named Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said that it would take “lethal” moves in the near future to bring about the South’s “pitiable demise.”
The North Korean mouthpiece also insulted Park personally, calling her an “American prostitute” for pushing through sanctions.
In the wake of Park’s removal, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn is running the government for 60 days until elections can be held.
The uncertainty of the next few months, not only about how the domestic drama will play out but about how North Korea might respond, is likely to give a few diplomats night terrors.
