Wed 27 January 2021:
Leading figures in the UK Jewish community are using Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January to focus on the persecution of Uighur Muslims, saying Jews have the “moral authority and moral duty” to speak out.
Held every year on January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates the people systematically killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany during World War II – six million Jews, many Roma, the disabled, and others – as well as victims of later genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Darfur.
Rabbis, community leaders and Holocaust survivors have been at the forefront of efforts to put pressure on the UK government to take a stronger stance over China’s brutal treatment of the Uighurs.
According to the United Nations, at least one million Uighurs, a mostly Muslim minority, have been detained in internment camps in the Xinjiang region, which borders eight countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
On Monday, René Cassin, a Jewish human rights organisation, co-host an interfaith event for Holocaust Memorial Day to highlight the detention of more than a million Uighurs and people from other minorities in camps in Xinjiang in north-west China. A video to accompany the event features a number of senior rabbis alongside Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, and Andrew Copson, the chief executive of Humanists UK.
Jewish News published a rare special midweek front page, saying “few issues could… be more urgent than the human rights atrocities currently taking place against Uighur Muslims under the world’s nose”.
Mia Hasenson-Gross, executive director of the Jewish human rights organisation Rene Cassin, said China was effectively attempting to “eradicate” the Uighur language, culture and tradition.
In the build-up to Holocaust Memorial Day, Rene Cassin co-hosted an interfaith event on Monday to highlight the Uighurs’ plight.
Uighur advocate Ziba Murat, who participated, said it was “incredibly meaningful [to] recognise our suffering”.
Murat’s mother, a Uighur doctor, was sentenced to 20 years in jail in China in March 2019 after disappearing six months earlier.
Critics of Xinjiang’s internment camps, including the UK government, say inmates at the network of facilities have been subjected to human rights violations including arbitrary detention, forced labour, torture and forced sterilisation, among others.
China denies those accusations and claims the camps are “re-education” centres. Chinese officials have long insisted that mass “education and training” is necessary in Xinjiang in order to fight what they call the “three evil forces of extremism, separatism and terrorism”, and boost economic development there.
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