HONOLULU -- Among the policy differences dividing the United States and South Korea, one that stands out is divergence over the issue of North Korea's abuses of the human rights of its own citizens.

In the U.S., President George W. Bush, both houses of Congress, and private, bipartisan committees have condemned North Korean abuses. The U.S. ambassador in Seoul, Alexander Vershbow, has been particularly outspoken.

Just last week, Vershbow chided the South Koreans for not standing up to the North. "I think all South Koreans," he said, "should be worried about a regime that threatens its own people so badly, that wastes its scarce resources on nuclear weapons, and that engages in counterfeiting, drug trafficking . . . and the export of dangerous military technologies."

Instead, President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea, who was a human-rights lawyer before entering elective politics, has been strangely subdued on this question. Senior officials of his government have argued that it is better to be "prudent" than to provoke the North Koreans with criticism. Some have demanded that the American ambassador be recalled.

In a press conference with Bush during his visit to South Korea in November, Roh asserted in a convoluted argument that his approach on the North Korean human-rights issue was similar to that of America's 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, in freeing the slaves during the Civil War: "President Lincoln's first priority was unity among the states of America."

The dispute over how to handle this issue comes against a backdrop of rising anti-Americanism in Korea and a nascent anti-Korean backlash in the United States. In particular, Washington and Seoul disagree over how to negotiate with Pyongyang on North Korea's nuclear ambitions. The Americans take a hard line while the South Koreans advocate "flexibility."

The U.S. and South Korea disagree on military matters. The South Koreans have said they will cut their troop deployment in Iraq by one-third this year while the Americans will move forces from positions close to the demilitarized zone dividing Korea to camps further south despite Seoul's objections. Command of Korean forces in wartime is in dispute.

Indeed, relations between the U.S. and South Korea have deteriorated so far that some Korea specialists have begun privately to speculate that the alliance will be diluted or possibly dissolved in five to eight years even though Bush and Roh have proclaimed it to be in good shape.

A particular point of contention has been two reports issued by the nonprofit U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. The first, "Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine in North Korea," says 1 million North Koreans, or about 5 percent of the nation's population, has died of famine over two decades because "the government was culpably slow to take the necessary steps to guarantee adequate food supplies."

Written by Stephan Haggard of the University of California, San Diego, and Marcus Noland of the Institute of International Economics in Washington, D.C., the report concluded: "It is difficult to imagine a famine of this magnitude, or chronic food shortages of this duration, occurring in a regime that protected basic political and civil liberties."

Roh's government objected, contending that South Korea had monitored its food aid to North Korea to assure that it was being distributed equitably to reach the people who needed it. Haggard and Noland disagreed in a rebuttal.

Earlier, the U.S. committee issued a report entitled "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps." Based largely on information from North Korean prisoners who had defected to South Korea, the report assessed two different systems of prisons. One set comprised forced labor camps, the other punished North Koreans who had fled to China and then been returned.

Written by David Hawk, a human-rights researcher who has reported on abuses in Cambodia and Rwanda, the study pointed to citizens arrested for guilt by association and lifetime sentences for three generations of political prisoners.

Hawk portrayed forced abortions for pregnant women who had fled to China and were forcibly sent back to North Korea or "murder of their new born infants." Further, he said: "The practice of torture permeates the North Korean prison and detention system."