By Prakash Dhakal

Nepal’s postal service, which is still the only means of keeping in touch with the rest of the world  for the majority of country’s population–  has found itself in the crossfire in the on-going hostilities between the government forces and the rebels.

Sabotage and bombing of post offices, attack on postmen and other postal service staff by the Maoist rebels as well as security forces have cost the country’s postal service dearly, cutting off millions of Nepalis in the country from the only accessible means of communications that reached to the doorsteps round the year.

According to the Department of Postal Services (DoPS) in Kathmandu, the Maoist guerrillas have vandalized 656 post offices, including district, ilaka and additional post offices, after the eruption of the Maoist rebellion, causing a total damage of over Rs.54.66 million. There are nearly four thousand post offices, including the additional post offices, across the country.

Though reports about attack, abduction and killing of postmen in Nepal by both the warring sides frequently appear in the national media, officials said they did not have the proper records. “Three postmen and an administrative staff on duty have been killed during the conflict,” a senior official at the department said. “We haven’t kept record of employees killed off duty,” he added.

According to the Department, Bire Saud, Chandra Bahadur Karki and Ramjee Poudel – were killed in Maoist attacks in Achham, Makawanpur and Pokhara respectively while a non-gazetted officer Nanda Bahadur Saud was killed in Achham.

“We have already spent over Rs.46 million for the repair and maintenance of the destroyed postal offices,” Indra Basyal, officer at the department said. He said that the prevailing insurgency in the country has severely affected the postal services. “The mobility of our mail carriers has been greatly affected due to the bloody conflict. And, many of our mail carriers have been compelled to live in the district headquarters due to security reasons,” he added.

According to an estimate, over five million residents in the hilly, often inaccessible districts of the country, have been affected due to disruption in the postal services. For them, postman was the only means of contact with their relatives living abroad-mainly in India-who delivered their letters at their doorsteps. Only a small proportion of the mail can be delivered via road and by air in Nepal where mountains and hills form over 80 percent of the country’s topography. The rest of the mail has to be delivered by the postmen physically. For the last few years,  the rebels have banned their movement in the rural areas suspecting that they could relay their activities back to the district headquarters. On the other hand, there have a number of incidences when the security personnel have shot dead hapless postmen suspecting them to be a Maoist guerrilla carrying a heavy bag.

Destruction of road links and suspension bridges by the rebels in remote northern districts has also affected mobility of postmen. “Delivering letters has become a risky  job in mid- western and far-western regions as Maoists threat our postman not to enter into their strongholds,” an officer with the DoPS recently transferred to Kathmandu from a mid-western district told Nepalnews. “Currently, access to postal service in the Maoist strongholds is negligible,” he added.

Interestingly, the Maoists have developed and are operating their own parallel postal system in their strongholds, reports say. According to an investigative report published in the pro-left Mulyankan monthly magazine, the rebels have set up their own post offices at the village, area and district level.

These `post offices’ are used to deliver letters sent by the Maoist cadres or party circulars from one part of the country to another and sometimes are even used to dispatch party’s leaders or new workers from one place to another in a safe way. Children below 16 years of age have been founding working as ‘postmen,’ the magazine reported.

The Maoists have even plans to expand parallel postal services to the local people by introducing their own stamps, the news report said.

Of over 24 million people in Nepal, only 300,000 people have access to the Internet, mostly in the urban areas. Several rural areas in the country either do not have telephone connections or are cut off from phone services due to the Maoist ‘revolutionary’ activity of targeting telephone repeater towers and other infrastructure.

Lamented an officer at the department, “In 18 year-long insurgency in Sri Lanka not even a single post office was attacked but the postal system is in severe crisis in Nepal. After all, we are equally important for Maoists too,” he added. Postal officials insist that postal services should be given an equal status as that of the Red Cross in countries like Nepal where basic services have been affected badly due to the on-going conflict. Unfortunately, human rights community and even the media is not paying enough attention to the plight of the country’s thousands of postmen,  let alone the warring factions.