Yana Toom, one of Estonia’s six Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), has submitted a request to the European Commission’s Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion Department. She wants it to investigate whether or not Estonian language law and policy go against the norms and principles of EU laws.

Claims that Estonian law somehow violates human and minority rights are nothing new. They’ve been brought forward and declared baseless countless times, and yet they keep coming.

While it’s fashionable to generalise and talk about “ethnic minorities”, there’s really only one ethnic minority here that feels discriminated against, and that’s the local Russians.

Among the local Russian minority are plenty of holders of the Estonian Alien’s Passport. They’re stateless, while enjoying all the benefits extended to any non-EU citizen who’s a permanent resident of Estonia.

All of these finer distinctions are crucial when looking at what’s been tried to discredit the Estonian state’s approach to the integration of that part of its Soviet heritage.

Up until not long ago, claims that Estonia violates human rights were usually connected to this group.

Stateless doesn’t mean without rights

The stateless are neither EU citizens nor Estonian citizens. One of the current complaints of people of Yana Toom’s revisionist persuasion is that the stateless can’t vote in European elections.

Which should be obvious, seeing as they’re not citizens of an EU member state.

The only exception to this rule is the UK, where citizens of Commonwealth members can vote in European elections. But this has to do with UK law, not a European principle.

The Court of Justice of the European Union last made the basis of all reasoning concerning European citizenship very clear in March 2010. The Court once again clarified that “citizenship of the Union is intended to be the fundamental status of nationals of the Member States” (judgement in the Rottmann case).

And once again, as a stateless person isn’t by default a national of an EU member state, they have no right to be represented in the European Parliament.

Hence Estonia does not discriminate its stateless residents by not including them in European elections. Their policy is legally sound.

Other than that, they enjoy the same rights as any permanent resident with non-EU citizenship. So for the sake of local comparison, an Estonian Alien’s Passport holder is even up with, say, a US citizen.

They can travel freely within the Schengen area; they don’t need a visa. And thanks to Russia’s sentimental attachment to the people it only remembers whenever convenient, they can also travel to their home of old without one.

Also, any holder of the Alien’s Passport can vote in municipal elections.

Any holder of the Alien’s Passport can move around the country unhindered. They can work wherever they want, go wherever they want, do as much as any other resident.

But they can’t expect to get privileged treatment, as they once did when the USSR occupied Estonia. And that’s really the one thing that seems to bother quite a few of them.

The language law is abused to justify anti-Estonian sentiment

Estonia has language laws in place that require a minimum level of Estonian language for professions and the like.

When Toom calls it “baffling that a trolleybus driver must be able to write short essays”, she’s going for political effect again —

Because what’s behind this minimum language requirement is the simple idea that a bus driver should be competent in Estonian so they can handle themselves in situations they might end up in.

Like a traffic accident, for example. Like talking to other motorists. Like being able to answer a question asked in a language other than — and here it comes again — Russian.

Toom’s point, and the point of all who agree with her, isn’t that the requirements are too high. Her point is that there shouldn’t be any in the first place.

In fact, her point is that Russian should be an official language of Estonia. That this country shouldn’t be as far away from Russia as it is these days. Her real point is that it should never have become independent.

Toom is a revisionist, and one of those here whose nostalgic longing for the defunct supposed paradise they grew up in has long become pathological.

You’re trying to find a public servant who doesn’t speak Russian? Good luck

If you live and work in this country, you get in touch with both Russians and Estonians. Wherever you go, you hear both languages. In shops, you find both languages printed on products. Behind counters, there are people who speak both languages.

And you soon realise that people like Yana Toom are turning reality upside down.

The law in place (called the keeleseadus) doesn’t aim at making Estonia Russian-free. It doesn’t aim at promoting Estonian as the one and only acceptable language. That’s a fiction.

What the keeleseadus really aims at is avoiding situations where any one person in a given situation speaks only Russian and nothing else. That’s what it’s for.

Because while anyone who only speaks Russian will get by in the North, West and South of the country, someone with zero Russian will have a hard time in the East. No matter whether the lack of understanding is genuine or not, you’re a lot more likely to end up in places where nobody speaks Estonian than places where nobody speaks Russian.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the reality of Estonia. Not the opposite, as propagated by the Russian state media and NGOs as prominent as Amnesty International.

What we’re dealing with here really doesn’t have its origins in human rights violations. It has its origins in plenty of Russians’ acute awareness of lost privilege. The complaints have very little to do with the country’s everyday reality.

In my eight and a half years in this country, I’ve encountered countless public servants who didn’t speak a word of English. Every single one of them offered me Russian as an alternative.

Not a single visit to a government office during my time here put me in the middle of a purely Estonian-speaking group. You’ll hear Russian wherever you go.

Confusing rights with feeling entitled

Thus what Toom’s request to the EC is based on is not a violation of rights, nor is it a divergence of Estonian law from EU principles. Toom’s request, in its entirety, is based on a twisted feeling of nationalist entitlement.

Part of the damage the Soviet system did to people’s minds is the idea that they’re entitled to whatever their next man has got. Never mind what it is, never mind the circumstances.

It’s precisely this feeling of entitlement that makes it impossible for somebody with a Soviet mindset to understand why language requirements for a particular position can make perfect sense.

It’s this feeling of entitlement that makes the hard core of supposed Russian patriots in Estonia think that their standard of living doesn’t come by virtue of the society they live in — but that they have a right to what it gets them anyway.

There are plenty of people — and organisations — that have internalised this and treat it as a fact like any other. In their case, the feeling of entitlement has mutated into seeing their supposed rights violated.

And nobody tells them how nonsensical this claim really is.

Amnesty International plays along

In the perception of a typical “Westerner”, human rights are usually violated by ruthless regimes — and the people complaining about it are victims. This view is etched into the minds of the millions following Western media.

This goes for Amnesty International as well. Despite not actually being present in Estonia, they’ve been taking NGO reports about human rights violations in this country the way they receive them — without investigation or questioning any of their claims.

Enter Yana Toom. She knows very well that any mention of minorities’ rights being violated on EU territory will have journalists as well as readers listen up.

She also knows what the topic triggers in the minds of her Russian-speaking audience. Especially in the minds of those that mainly follow Russian media.

For years Kremlin-controlled news has made it a sport to take situations that have nothing to do with actual human rights being violated — such as an allegedly demeaning Ukrainian language law — and give them the appearance of the exact same thing the Western press gets excited about.

To create the impression that, once again, it’s really all the same: They do it, we do it, why should we listen to their complaints.

One thing the Western and Russian angles have in common is that the respect for facts is suffering. Where Russian media twist them and manipulate context, Western media are so obsessed with expertise that unless somebody shows up with the exact qualifications they think the situation requires, nobody will take any opinion seriously.

In the case of Estonia and human rights, this creates an absurd situation:

Pro-Russian NGOs, very aware that the terms “NGO”, “minority” and “human rights” are associated with idealism and fighting for victims’ rights in the West, claim that human rights are being violated —

And, acutely aware of their lack of qualified knowledge, the Western media merrily join in, while they leave the sorting out of the actual situation to columnists and little-promoted independents that hardly have an audience.

Amnesty International jumped this bandwagon a long time ago.

A closer look at what Estonia is allegedly doing to its minorities

In last year’s annual report, Amnesty International makes two actual claims about the treatment of minorities in Estonia:

It claims that “stateless people enjoy limited political rights”.

And it claims that Estonia “is in breach of its obligations” under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

That makes for some excellent ammunition for Yana Toom and people of her interest group. Have you heard? Estonia discriminates minorities and tramples on the rights of children! And the EU, NATO and the US condone it. The hypocrites!

Makes excellent news on the First Baltic Channel and Putin’s English propaganda mouthpiece, RT.

Things are really quite different. The thing about children refers to the fact that Estonia doesn’t grant citizenship automatically to anyone born in the country.

Apart from the US, only 29 out of the world’s 194 countries grant the jus soli, the right of the soil, to anyone born on their territory. (Just in case you’re wondering — Russia isn’t one of them.)

The references to civil and political rights are equally far-fetched. The complaint here is that the stateless don’t have the exact same rights as full Estonian citizens.

Which is absurd: After all, the stateless are not Estonian citizens.

There is no UN convention or EU principle that would require a country to automatically grant citizenship to all its residents at any point in time — which means the fact that Estonia didn’t make all its residents citizens in the early 1990s is as legally sound as its present-day policy.

More than that, it’s understandable. Estonia was occupied by the USSR; its democratically elected officials and its parliament replaced with a puppet state; tens of thousands of its citizens deported, arrested, murdered; its political identification figures placed in mental institutions, prisons and labour camps.

Then they meddled with the population as well. Tens of thousands of Russians were brought into Estonia, much of them replacing the deported Estonians in the very houses that had been taken away from them.

Yet the remaining Soviet-era settlers as well as their descendants still enjoy plenty of rights, and are leading an overall much safer existence than could have been said of ethnic Estonians in their own country under Soviet rule.

Far more resist the propaganda than the pro-Russian groups care to see

The number of stateless has decreased dramatically over the last two decades. Less than 90,000 are left, down from originally a third of the country’s population in the early 90s.

Deaths and the ageing population play a role in this, yes. But so does successful integration.

The ones that are left are divided into different groups. Some like the visa-free travel to Russia; some are simply old and refuse to adapt to the changed reality. There are plenty of Soviet dreamers left.

And the young, by their own accounts, are more interested in the possibilities Europe has to offer than in outrageous notions of patriotism and loyalty owed to a country that ceased to exist soon three decades ago.

Apart from baseless claims, Amnesty International also falls for hearsay

In the same annual report mentioned above, Amnesty International also passes on what it says is “reportedly” true:

“Language requirements for employment were reportedly placing ethnic minorities at a disadvantage.”

They don’t provide any further comment on where they had those reports from or what kind of research they were based on. This matters, because Amnesty doesn’t have an Estonian office. They get their information from local NGOs, and we have no idea how reliable their sources are.

Which makes it nothing more than an allegation in the line of Russian propaganda that Amnesty have decided to endorse.

As Estonia’s the supposed villain here, it would be pertinent for Amnesty as well as the Western media to occasionally remember that at least some sort of proof should be produced before accusing a whole country of randomly violating the rights of its minorities.

But as none is offered, we’ll move on.

The report also states that there are “concerns that ethnic and linguistic discrimination could be a contributing factor” to minorities being disproportionately affected by unemployment and poverty.

First off: As you might have guessed by this point, they’re not inclined to tell us whose concerns they’re talking about. More hearsay, then.

Secondly, that ethnic and linguistic minorities are disproportionately affected by poverty is a plain reality. So is the fact that they’ll remain disproportionately affected if they don’t integrate.

What this is really about is who should be expected to adapt

In any country there are groups of immigrants who aren’t yet integrated, or who refuse to be. That’s not a political statement on my part, it’s a reality.

For the first generation coming in, this may mean a life as a shopkeeper catering mainly to their own minority. Where I grew up, we had a Turkish shop the owner of which hardly spoke any German. But his kids did. They went to school and, essentially, were much like us.

That immigrants should take over the ways of their new home country isn’t a perverse notion. It’s no more than normal, so long as they’re not forced to do it beyond a reasonable measure.

What is perverse is the expectation that the country receiving the immigrants should change their ways to accommodate them for the only reason that their country of origin is bigger, has a larger population, has tanks, is the bigger bully, you name it.

In the discussion about alleged human rights violations in Estonia, the reasonable measure mentioned above is just the point. Applying for Estonian citizenship, beyond having lived here for eight years you’re required to speak the national language — and to swear an oath not to violate its constitutional order.

And that’s it.

No changing names. No giving up your culture — unless that culture implies looking down on everyone but your own kind.

And this brings us back to Ms Toom and her supporters.

What you’re looking at in the case of Yana Toom and the likes of her — and in the case of Amnesty International subscribing to the revisionist nonsense these people have become notorious for — is exclusive nationalism paired with entitlement.

The reason why they think they should have it all is the way they see themselves as Russian. That is the main driving force behind it.

And they can call those who disagree with them fascists as long as they like; their actions are driven by a feeling of superiority over pretty much everyone else — and if you listen closely, what you hear will remind you of the third and fourth decade of the last century quite a bit.

Revisionism is an essential part of this kind of thinking. Invoking the Soviet Union and its ideological facade of democracy and friendship of nations under Russian leadership, they see themselves as the natural citizens of any last square millimetre of territory that’s ever been in Soviet hands.

And perhaps, just a tiny bit too much, as part of the one nation who used to run the show.

Historical accuracy isn’t anything revisionists like to spend their precious time on. Current events, like the Chief Prosecutor of the Russian Federation looking into whether or not the independence of the Baltic states from the Soviet Union was legal, only underline that.

One provocation follows the other.

And while it should be perfectly obvious that the way they argue isn’t compatible with the practices of Western media and institutions, they can go on doing it — because mostly these same media and institutions are just too bloody lazy to check their facts.