As U-turn from cuts, Estonia bolsters border guard

Photo: Küllike Rooväli

Come New Year, Estonian state will launch border guard strike teams to be based at Narva and Piusa cordons. «In high likelihood, a third location will be Tallinn; also in high likelihood, maritime capacity will emerge,» added interior minister Hanno Pevkur.

Meanwhile, several sources with knowledge of Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) workings have noted that similar teams have just recently been dismantled – at the start of this year. These were units receiving deeper training and occasionally getting together for exercises.

Vice Admiral and one-time Border Guard Board chief Tarmo Kõuts said the alert-teams were created at the end of 1990ies to be ready to react in case masses of immigrants crossed the border – that used to be the worry in those days. According to V. Adm. Kõuts, the men got special training and, back them, the equipment was better.

According to PPA development department Border Guard Lieutenant-Colonel Priit Järvpõld, however, the dismantled alert units cannot be compared to the strike teams now created.

«The alert units which were wound down during the first half of the year were basically training centres with mainly full-time instructors employed. People from cordons and border points went to them for training. During that time, the cordons or border points had to do with diminished staff,» described Lieut. Col. Järvpõld.

Also, he added, it was very time-consuming and expensive to get to work in Eastern border while being trained in Valga.

In June and September, PPA established border guard operative services at Narva and Piusa – based on these, strike teams will be launched at the beginning of 2015. For these, PPA plans hiring extra staff.

«The strike teams will be permanently manned to provide support to cordons and border points. The teams will be tasked with reacting to events on external border, patrolling the external border, and monitoring and solving border incidents,» listed Lieut. Col. Järvpõld. According to him, the staff from said units can be involved as support to border points, to close up certain areas, as measures of compensation, for searches, or to solve other situations in urgent need of added power.

«At the moment, the border guard is not just plagued by the forest-engulfed boundary line, but by being undermanned and the border guards stuck with low social status at Police Board,» assessed V. Adm. Tarmo Kõuts. «At the current level of manning, we are not effective enough for the little-green-men syndrome.» He said there are currently fewer than 700 people guarding the Eastern border, half of whom are checking documents in border posts. The work organised in three shifts, a hundred or so people are seeing to the border at a time.

«When we founded the border guard, there were 400 guards in Narva whose job was not checking passports but guarding the border,» said V. Adm. Kõuts.