North Korea on Monday slammed a display of Christmas lights staged by a South Korean church group near the tense border as an "unacceptable provocation".| Of course. It demonstrates graphically that even a mere private association can afford the cost of such blatant wastefullness. |
The lights, which can be seen several kilometers away in the impoverished North which suffers chronic power shortages, will remain switched on until early January.
The display is "an undisguised challenge to us and an unacceptable provocation", the North's official Korean Central News Agency said.
It warned that staging "psychological warfare" along the border would be a "rash act" that could ignite war on the peninsula.
Before the South's "Sunshine Policy" of engagement with North Korea was launched in 1998, the seasonal lighting displays were common.
Pyongyang repeatedly condemned them as "psychological warfare" by its capitalist neighbor aimed at spreading Christianity in the isolated communist state.