A few weeks ago I received my pen pal Shahen Hovsepian’s “Cultural Genocide” (Tehran 2006, 171 pages) book/photo-album.

The book (in Armenian, English and Farsi) features several hundreds of photographs testifying to the destruction of Armenian monuments in Turkey as a result of the genocidal campaign to eliminate Turkey’s Armenian past.

Since I have researched the topic for three years now, most of the photographs were familiar.

Furthermore, I was surprised to see Shahen using many photographs from www.Hayastan.com’s “Culutral genocide” gallery section (which is not available in its old format now, since I, as Hayastan.com gallery’s moderator, have not updated it after Turkish hacker attacks), which ended up being the core of my “Cultural Genocide 2005” CD (I sent Shahen a copy of the CD but I guess never told him that I was the moderator of Hayastan.com’s gallery). Although I had spent more than two years on creating the gallery and the CD, neither of those photographs were taken by me. Thus, again we are facing the copyright issue that I had addressed in the CD, but not in the gallery. Hopefully, the photographers will not get very upset by Shahen’s book, since it is done for a good cause.

Shahen writes, “…we express our thanks to R.A.A. organization, Virtual Ani and Hayastan web pages… for delivering their photos for publishing in this book.”

Congratulations and many thanks to Shahen Hovsepian for publishing the very important photo-album. The destruction and neglect of Armenian monuments in Turkey is undeletable issue and much work, first of all awareness, needs to be done.

UPDATE: As a response to this entry, Shahen sent me a letter which elaborated on the copyright issue:

Dear Simon,

Thank you so much for introducing the Cultural
Genocide book in your web page and I hope it can be
useful.

There is more than 10 years which I am traveling to
East and West Armenia and taking many photos which
they have been used many times without asking my
authorization therefore copy right is very important
for me also.

In this regards when two years ago Sebouh srbazan
decided to publish such a book I sent many e-mails to
all web pages including Hayastan web page to receive
their authorization to use the photos in the book
which I informed by Hayastan that most of the photos
took by Baze [Hrair Khatcherian] therefore I found his e-mail and
contacted with him and received his positive answer to
use his photos.

[…]

With thanks and best wishes,

Shahen