North Korea's Committee for Peaceful Unification of the Fatherland has criticized as "anti-nationalistic" Seoul's push to register the demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas as a world heritage.

In a statement Monday, the semi-official organization dealing with the North's South Korea policy, said that the DMZ "dividing the fatherland" should not be preserved as it is, but that its barbed-wire fences and concrete walls should be torn down.

Pyongyang's statement appears to be in part a response to a move in South Korea to have the no-man's land designated as a world cultural heritage.

The 280-kilometer-long, four-kilometer-wide buffer zone has been off-limits to humans for five decades, and offers a rare habitat for flora and fauna unseen elsewhere in the world.