A retired physician, who helped set up a campaign to protest against the persecution of the Uyghur population in China, has said that the Jewish community had “a duty to join the protest”.

Sheldon Stone, 68, from Hendon, became involved in Stop Uyghur Genocide after coming across a testimony from a survivor of a Uyghur concentration camp in China.

The Uyghurs are a Turkic, majority Muslim people native to the Uyghur Region in Northwest China, with their own distinct culture and language. The Chinese government’s official name for the region is Xinjiang, while the Uyghurs prefer to call the area East Turkistan.

Human rights groups believe that China has detained millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps and accuses China of committing crimes against humanity, with some countries, including the UK and the US saying it is genocide. China denies all human rights abuses.

Sheldon Stone at Limmud (Photo: Gaby Wine)

Addressing Limmud conference in Birmingham, Stone, 68, said: “I was reading this account from someone who had been released from one of the concentration camps because she had dual nationality, being both Chinese and Kazakh.

"From the photos, the camps looked exactly like Auschwitz. She talked about people being tortured and gang-raped routinely and that pregnant women were being forced to have abortions.”

Stone shelved his original retirement plan, which was to promote environmental issues in the Jewish community, to focus instead on campaigning for the Uyghur population.

Uyghur men being held in a concentration camp in China (Photo: Wikipedia)

“When I went online to find out who was protesting against the Uyghur genocide, I found that there wasn’t much being done. The echoes of the Holocaust were very strong for me, and I thought that perhaps I should take this issue on in my retirement instead.”

As a former doctor, he was “particularly appalled” by the medical abuses and the treatment of women. “The accounts were harrowing,” he told the JC.

Uyghur women being watched by Chinese military (Photo: René Cassin)

Stone said that the Chinese government aimed to sterilise at least 80 per cent of Uyghur women and according to a report by the Jamestown Foundation in the States, between 2015 and 2018, population growth in the largely Uyghur areas of Kashgar and Hotan fell by 84 per cent and by 2020, in one Uyghur region, the birthrate was near-zero.

“Uyghur traditionally have big families. They are a devout, warm community with their own art, culture and poetry,” said Stone.

He said that since 2017, up to three million people had been detained in the concentration camps “and we have no idea how many have died from beatings, torture or sheer medical neglect”.

Among medical abuses, Stone cited forced organ harvesting and genomics surveillance so that “all Uyghurs have their DNA recorded. This helps [the Chinese authorities] select the Uyghur and other minorities who are in peak health. Around 60,000 to 100,000 Uyghurs have organs taken out every year and die.”

Other crimes against humanity committed by the Chinese authorities against the Uyghur population included slave labour in labour camps and factories, the abduction of over one million Uyghur children from parents, who are taken to boarding schools and state orphanages “to turn them into Han Chinese citizens”, and forced marriages, said Stone.

Through the Jewish human rights organisation René Cassin, Stone was put in touch with Rahima Mahmut, an Uyghur, who had fled China and was now based in London. Mahmut, who is the director of the British office of the World Uyghur Congress, also spoke at Limmud about the campaign to prevent UK public bodies from procuring solar panels containing materials made by persecuted Uyghur labourers.

Rahima Mahmut, an Uyghur human rights activist (Photo: Antonio Zazueta Olmos Photography)

Stone told the JC: “I said to her: ‘What you need is a campaign which is similar to the anti-apartheid movement in the UK in the 1980s, but it must be Uyghur-led since you will know what the consequences will be for your people in China.’”

After helping to set up Stop Uyghur Genocide with Mahmut, who is now its executive director, Stone now sits on the advisory board.

The organisation’s aims are to get the camps closed down and stop the slave labour of Uyghurs, who are used for production of cotton, tomatoes, silicone for solar panels and hi-tech electronic components. They also campaign to end medical abuses, reunite Uyghur children with their families and end genomic and hi-tech surveillance of the Uyghur population.

Stone said that it was incumbent on the Jewish community to take action. “Historically, we know what it is like to suffer genocide with too few people speaking up for us.

“Slave labour is forbidden by Jewish law, and we were slaves in Egypt and later in Nazi slave labour camps. We also have a duty to protest against the medical abuses.”

Their work has been supported by Board of Deputies and both the late Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis have spoken out against the genocide of the Uyghur population.

A Stop Uyghur Genocide protest in London (Photo: Stop Uyghur Genocide)

Stone says that The Stop Uyghur Genocide campaign “attacks the prosperity of China by raising the profile of slave labour to discourage, through legal means, the purchase of products produced from slave labour. This will create a problem for China.”

Since starting the campaign over three years ago, the sale of cotton from China had gone down by 21 per cent, said Stone, and some medical organisations had suspended collaboration with Chinese medical bodies working in transplantation medicine. He added that both the British Medical Association and the World Medical Association had condemned all medical abuses and had called on the Chinese Medical Association to stop their members taking part.

stopuyghurgenocide.uk