Concern Mounts Over Delay in Filling North Korea Rights Job

WASHINGTON - North Korean human rights advocates yesterday expressed concern that the White House is dragging its feet on naming a human rights envoy to the country, a position expected to be filled by a former White House adviser, Jay Lefkowitz.

Organizers for yesterday's all-day Freedom House conference on rights in North Korea said Mr. Lefkowitz, who is widely believed to be President Bush's choice as envoy to North Korea, was scheduled to speak here last week and expected to announce his assumption of the new post.

But his name was taken off the schedule over the weekend, according to an organizer of the conference, Jae Ku.

"There was talk he would be announced today or before the conference. But then we got a call to say that the announcement has been delayed." Mr. Ku declined to say from whom he received the call.

Next week, six-party talks with North Korea over its nuclear program will resume. The talks will aim to convince the "hermit kingdom" to rejoin the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and end its enrichment of uranium. In the past, the country's unelected leader, Kim Jong Il, has taken to name-calling when North Korea's atrocious human rights record is mentioned publicly by Mr. Bush. The president in April referred to the horrors of North Korea's concentration camps at a press conference, a point personalized here yesterday by the firsthand testimony of a North Korean refugee, Young Soon Kim, who spent more than eight years in one of the gulags and saw her parents and two sons murdered.

Last year, Congress passed and Mr. Bush signed the North Korean Human Rights Act, which, among other things, creates the post of envoy for North Korean human rights. The position is similar to other high-level envoys created in recent years to Sudan and for human trafficking.

The naming of the envoy, however, is overdue.

"Why they have taken so long on this, I don't know," Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican of Virginia, told the Sun yesterday. "This is not exactly the Ronald Reagan approach to government." Mr. Wolf called the fact that Mr. Lefkowitz is Mr. Bush's choice "the worst-kept secret in Washington."

A former American ambassador to Hungary, Mark Palmer, who introduced the first speaker at the conference yesterday, said Mr. Lefkowitz "would be terrific in the job." He added, "It's really a disgrace that they haven't named anyone yet."