WASHINGTON – When President Bush Wednesday night predicted that Iraq’s elections would “inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran,” many North Korean human rights activists in his own party wondered why he left out Pyongyang.

In a State of the Union speech in which the president pledged America’s solidarity with Iranian democrats, encouraged Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to allow greater political reform, and chided Syria for exporting terror, the only warning Mr. Bush issued North Korea was “We’re working closely with the governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions.”

For a totalitarian regime consistently ranked as one of the world’s worst human-rights abusers, his brief remark was not enough for many activists seeking to bring down Kim Jong Il’s tyranny.

“The president should have mentioned human rights in North Korea. It is one of the most repressive governments in the world,” the director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, Nina Shea, said yesterday.

The vice chairman of the North Korean Freedom Coalition, Suzanne Scholte, said, “We are missing an opportunity. We have to reach out to the North Korean people, we have to press on human rights. I appreciate the president’s march for freedom, but we need to remember there are political prisoners in North Korea, 400,000 of them.”

In the past, the president has spoken about the startling cruelty in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s first book about the Bush presidency, “Plan of Attack,” Mr. Bush said he was made aware of aerial photographs of huge swaths of territory set aside for the state’s gulags. Refugees who have escaped the country say it is routine for guards in these camps to force women to ingest gallons of water and then stomp on their stomachs until they burst. Last year, the BBC reported that political prisoners were the subjects of experiments with chemical weapons, recalling the horrors of the Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele.

Last fall, Mr. Bush signed the North Korea Human Rights Act, a bill that creates the position of a special ambassador for human rights in the country and authorizes $2 million in funding for a conference on human rights about North Korea. Also, the legislation expresses a sense of the Congress that America should press for human rights reforms in addition to nuclear disarmament in future six-party talks.

Ms. Scholte, whose organization comprises some 40 American and Korean nongovernmental organizations, said she recently received a fax from a commander in the North Korean military, originally sent to Radio Free Asia. She said the fax pointedly states that the North Korean people know who is supporting freedom in that country and who is not.

When her coalition makes the fax available, and if it is verified, it could have significant implications. A common assumption among many policy makers is that North Korea, because it suffocates all political dissent, has no potential for opposition activities. This is in sharp contrast to Iran, where opponents of the regime have taken to the Internet and other press outlets to criticize the ruling Mullahs.

A key organizer of the coalition on North Korean human rights, Michael Horowitz, said yesterday that he feared Pyongyang was preparing to make a deal on their nuclear weapons that would erase the human-rights component from the American agenda. “The effort will be made to give the president a seductive package that allows him to declare peace because we signed another framework agreement, because we got twice as many weapons inspectors as Clinton did,” Mr. Horowitz said. He added that human rights in North Korea would be “an acid test” for the president’s overall agenda on advancing freedom.

Nonetheless, not all activists on the issue are as worried. The vice president for public policy with the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty commission, Barrett Duke, said he believed “the days of extorting the United States are over.” He added, “I expect North Korea to be one of the countries that would be addressed in the principles the president set forth in the state of the Union address. I believe the White House will include humanitarian concerns in negotiations with North Korea.”