The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Saturday accused South Korea of refusing to talk and driving inter-Korean relations towards catastrophe.

The criticism was expressed in a memorandum released by the Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, according to the official KCNA news agency.

The DPRK body was quoted as saying the present South Korean authorities stopped all dialogue overnight and trampled on all the successes achieved thanks to the north-south joint declarations as soon as they came to power.

The memorandum added South Korea had worsened already hostile military relations between the north and the south by "intensifying the moves for a war of aggression against the north and the anti-DPRK nuclear racket and faking hideous conspiratorial cases and sparking a military clash."

It also accused Seoul of taking advantage of the north-south Red Cross working contact and talks over humanitarian issues to achieve their "sinister purpose of confrontation" and of causing preliminary talks for the resumption of the inter-Korean high-level military talks to break down.

Such anti-reunification acts could never be pardoned, said the memorandum, while urging the south not to misjudge the north's efforts for dialogue and to take the serious consequences into account.