Hello, American Prestige listeners.

It's Derek, and I am joined, as always, by my friend and comrade Danny Bessner.

We are very pleased to welcome to the program on short notice, so we're extremely grateful.

Una Jo, Una is a postdoc at Darton, the Sticky Center for International Understanding.

She focuses on democracy and peace in East Asia.

Una, thank you so much for coming to the program.

Thanks so much for having me.

So obviously we are here to talk about the Sorted Affairs of South Korea over the last couple of days. And why don't

we just start with what happened? As you were observing this, give us your take on what took place

Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. Yeah. So it was wild to say the least. So on Tuesday night,

South Korean President Yun So Gguer declared martial law.

He cited Article 77 of our Constitution that stipulates that the president can suspend civilian

rule by military powers during a state of crises, including wars and events like natural disasters.

We have two kinds of martial laws, security and emergency, and this one was the latter.

An emergency law allows presidents to restrict freedom of speech, publication, and so on.

Also implement special changes to authority of governments and courts.

So shortly after he announced this, the South Korean Army Chief was appointed the martial law commander,

and he issued the first and only decree which banned all political activity, meaning no rallies,

no protests, no political gatherings of any kind.

And it also gave the military power to arrest elected lawmakers if they tried to enter

the National Assembly, some of which we saw when special forces stormed the building about

40 minutes after the declaration. The decree also suspended basic freedoms like

...