Potato seal from 1971

A French journalist has given his passport to the Liberation War Museum which bore a visa stamp carved out of a potato.

Freedom fighters had issued Philippe Marc Edouard Alfonsi, now 74, an on-arrival visa on April 3, eight days after the Bangladesh’s Liberation War began in 1971.

Alfonsi believes it is the first visa issued on behalf of independent Bangladesh.

He handed it over for preservation to the museum in a formal event on Saturday.

“People of Bangladesh had realised that it was time to take up everything in their own hands. The seal they put on my passport is a proof of that,” Alfonsi said in French.

The writing around the seal on his passport reads – South-Western Command, Chuadanga.

The word Bangladesh appears on a crudely carved map at the seal’s centre.

There is a signature next to it by regional commander Dr Ashabul Haque, who Alfonsi believes was the first administrator for Chuadanga of independent Bangladesh.

His passport bore another seal by the Armed Forces at the bottom.

“It was an unequal war,” the foreign journalist wrote in the leaflet for film - Birth of a Flag. “The Pakistanis wanted to win with the use of brute force.”

“The freedom fighters, determined in their demand, put Bangladesh’s first official seal on my passport when the Pakistani tanks were shelling them at every battle front with support from the US and most countries of the west.”

Fighters for Bangladesh battled all adversities during the nine months of war to attain their goal, he writes.

There were many who came to Kolkata to cover the war, but no one had the courage to go to the battle field, Alfonsi told the event at Liberation War museum.

“We entered Bangladesh under these circumstances. Our report shook up the western world. People got to know the truth.”

“I was given the visa after Pakistanis targeted a village in Bangladesh with fire bombs.”

He thanked Pierre Desgraupes and Pierre Dumayet of TV channel Premier Information, where he worked then, for sending him to Bangladesh.