It is awful that China has so harshly imprisoned those two women (the officer’s mother and sister-in-law). It is also awful that the Dutch military chose to rec

It is awful that China has so harshly imprisoned those two women (the officer’s mother and sister-in-law). It is also awful that the Dutch military chose to recapitulate China’s cruelty by suspending the officer. However, let us not be stupid here. The officer says, and by reprinting it the reporter appears to tacitly agree, that the decision is driven by racism: “He can see no reason for it other than his ethnicity”. However, the decision is clearly driven by national security concerns: a foreign superpower is holding two of his relatives captive because the relatives are in contact with him and the superpower knows he is in the military (the article reports that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs determined his sister-in-law was imprisoned for “providing information to foreign armed forces”). His ethnicity happens to be the reason his relatives are in China, but that detail is completely screened off by the fact that China has imprisoned his relatives. Spelling it out: if he was not Uighur but China still had his relatives imprisoned, he would still be suspended; if he was Uighur but China did not have his relatives imprisoned, he would not be suspended. As evidence to support the belief that this is how the military is making their decision, we can note that the second scenario is what was already happening all along - he was Uighur when they hired him and he was Uighur when they sent him to work on F-35s, it was only when China imprisoned his relatives that they suspended him. What tips me over into responding to this is it seems the reporter should be aware of this reason too. They write “China has been oppressing the Uyghurs since 2017, but it wasn’t a problem for Defense then”. Yeah, because China hadn’t arrested this guy’s relatives in 2017! Yet, somehow, both the officer and the reporter instead draw the conclusion that the Dutch military spontaneously developed a bad case of racism against Uighurs in 2021.