Judge Approves Landmark Insurance Settlement To Benefit Armenians
By TIM MOLLOY of Associated Press - July 31, 2004LOS ANGELES (AP) _ A landmark $20 million settlement was approved in a lawsuit over unpaid insurance benefits for descendants of Armenians killed nearly a century ago in the Ottoman Empire.
U.S. District Court Judge Christina A. Snyder formally approved the settlement Friday. She had granted preliminary approval for the unpaid death benefits earlier this year.
Attorneys said they filed the class-action suit to raise awareness of the deaths as well as to win money from New York Life Insurance Co.
"We were able to bring to court a lawsuit that brings some recognition of the genocide,'' said attorney Brian S. Kabateck, who, like co-counsel Mark Geragos, is Armenian-American.
It is believed to be the first legal agreement involving what Armenians say was the death of 1.5 million people from 1915-23 in a campaign to force them out of eastern Turkey.
Turkey says the death count is inflated and that Armenians were killed or displaced along with others as the collapsing Ottoman Empire tried to quell civil unrest.
France and Russia are among 15 countries, along with a United Nations human rights panel, that have recognized the killings as genocide. The United States has not made such a declaration.
One plaintiff, 89-year-old Martin Marootian, will receive $250,000. His mother first sought benefits in 1923 for Marootian's uncle, who bought a policy in 1910 and was killed in 1915.
"What it really is is an insurance case and not an Armenian genocide case, but the two are interwoven together,'' Marootian said.
"It's fair, adequate and reasonable,'' New York Life's attorney, John Carroll Holmes, commented about the settlement to the Daily News of Los Angeles. "New York Life behaved very nobly in the face of the atrocities and paid all the claims that came forward.''
New York Life sold about 8,000 policies in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the 1880s, with fewer than half of those bought by Armenians. It stopped selling insurance there in 1915.
The company said it located about one-third of the policyholders' descendants to pay benefits. The rest of the policies languished because the remaining heirs could not be found, the firm said.
Under the agreement, $11 million will be set aside to pay claims by heirs of some 2,400 policyholders. About $3 million will go to Armenian charitable organizations.
Another $2 million will be used for administrative costs, with anything not spent on expenses going to the charities. The remaining $4 million will cover attorneys' fees. | 
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