North Korea on Friday accused South Korea of intentionally avoiding inter-Korean dialogue, also claiming Seoul was blocking its allies from talking or providing assistance to the impoverished North.

An unidentified spokesman for Disarmament and Peace Institute, which operates under the North Korean Foreign Ministry, claimed this was because the South was still seeking to unify the two Koreas by "absorption" or force.

"Pressurized by the public at home and abroad to resume dialogue and negotiations, they are giving lip-service to "open-hearted" dialogue but, in actuality, making it impossible for dialogue to open by craftily raising unreasonable preconditions unacceptable to the DPRK," the spokesman said in a statement arried by the North's Korean Central News Agency. DPRK stands for he North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"It is a base scenario for them to justify their 'waiting strategy' and bar their allies from coming out for dialogue with the DPRK or feeling any need to give humanitarian aid to it," the statement said.

The spokesman said the so-called "waiting strategy" will inevitably fail and only lead to a war if the South continues to pursue unification by absorption following the North's collapse.

"The U.S. and Japan lost nearly 20 years due to their repeated DPRK policy failures under the miscalculation that the DPRK would collapse just as East European countries did. It was a hard reality that they compelled the DPRK to have access to nuclear weapons in the end," the statement said.

"Under the situation where there is deep-rooted distrust between the North and the South and huge armed forces are standing in confrontation with each other, any attempt on the part of a side to swallow the other side up would inevitably spark a war."

The spokesman said the best, if not the only, way to unify the divided Koreas was through its proposal for unification by federal formula.

"The said proposal of the DPRK is the best one for peaceful reunification as it guarantees feasibility and helps avert war because it presupposes the co-existence of the present systems in the North and the South," he said.

The two Koreas have been divided since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, and are still at war, technically, as the war ended only with an armistice pact, not a peace treaty.

Relations between the two Koreas dipped to their lowest ebb after the communist North sank a South Korean warship, Cheonan, in March 2010, killing 46 South Korean sailors. The North again attacked a populated South Korean island in November, killing two civilians and two armed service members there.

Pyongyang has repeatedly urged Seoul to resume their dialogue in recent months, denying any involvement in the sinking of the Cheonan and claiming its shelling of the South Korean island, Yeonpyeong, was sparked by an armed provocation by the South.

Seoul says a breakthrough in inter-Korean ties will only come after the North shows sincere commitment to its denuclearization and apologizes for the two incidents that took 50 South Korean lives. (Yonhap News)