UNIPATH STAFF
The Border Management Staff College in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, has started an all-female course to train border guards in stopping traffickers, smugglers and violent extremists. Sponsored by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the intensive four-week course provides vital skills for a segment of the population underrepresented among border forces.
“I grew up in a family of border guards. Besides my father, both my mother and sister are border professionals,” said Alexander Eliseev, chief of education at the college. “Moreover, in one of the border detachments where I worked, 80 percent of the staff were women. They were the ones with an incredible sense of responsibility and constantly paid attention to details. These are the qualities that made them effective and successful.”
The training hasn’t benefited just women from Tajikistan. Afghan women have also learned border monitoring skills vital to maintaining order in that socially conservative nation. Cross-border migration of families means women are often needed to conduct searches and interviews of women and children, examine travel documents and provide humanitarian assistance.
“Knowing they can ask questions and be dealt with as a woman, by another woman, can be an encouragement to taking legal migration routes rather than irregular means of border crossing,” the OSCE noted.
Aside from the humanitarian mission, border guards play a dominant role in patrolling drug trafficking routes and foiling cross-border incursions from extremists. Officials on both sides of the 1,300-mile Tajik-Afghan border are confident in their growing capabilities to confront such threats. Tajik border guards say that they are highly prepared and have a solid infrastructure of border posts left by frontier troops from the days of the Soviet Union.
In fact, the women officers’ training included a stay at the Tajik-Afghan border crossing at Panji Poyon. “Tajik women border guards work here, too,” the OSCE said. “It is a test of anyone’s mettle.”
Sources: Institute of War and Peace Reporting, OSCE