Armenian Genocide Insurance Pact Near

A tentative multimillion-dollar settlement was disclosed Wednesday in a Los Angeles class action lawsuit filed on behalf of heirs of Armenian genocide victims who accused New York Life Insurance Co. of failing to honor valid insurance claims.

New York Life has agreed to pay at least $3 million to Armenian civic organizations in addition to paying 10 times the face value of the policy on an estimated 2,500 valid claims.

New York Life spokesman William Werfelman and plaintiffs’ attorneys William Shernoff of Claremont and Brian Kabateck of Century City predicted that U.S. District Judge Christine Snyder in Los Angeles would approve the settlement in the next few months.

The pending deal was applauded by Archbishop Vatche Hovsepian, primate of the Western Diocese of the Armenian Church of North America, based in Burbank. He called the agreement “an appropriate settlement to provide restitution to those whose loved ones suffered and perished in our nation’s darkest hour.”

Martin Martoonian, an 85-year-old La Canada Flintridge resident who is the lead plaintiff, said he was withholding judgment on the merits of the settlement.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers said they believe that a sizable number of potential beneficiaries are California residents.

About 300,000 Los Angeles County residents are of Armenian descent, more than in any place outside of the Republic of Armenia.

As part of the settlement, New York Life is supposed to publish a list of names of individuals who purchased life insurance from the company in the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) before 1915.

From 1915 to 1923, about 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by Turks and tens of thousands more were deported in what some historians have described as the first genocide of the 20th century.

The settlement was announced just 13 days before the 86th anniversary of the start of the killings--now known as Armenian Martyrs Day.

Policyholder List Expected on Internet

When the suit was filed in November 1999, attorneys contended that New York Life had sold more than 7,600 policies in the Ottoman Empire that could be the subject of claims because they had not been paid. The attorneys said the policies were worth up to $3 billion in current dollars.

But it is anticipated that the actual payout will be only a small fraction of that. On Wednesday, Shernoff said an initial review of the policies showed that some had been paid, some had lapsed before 1915 and a number had been sold to people who were not Armenian or who died before the mass 1915 killings.

“It came down to 2,500 policies,” Shernoff said. He said that because most of the people who bought the policies were killed more than 80 years ago, it was hard to predict how many claims would be filed by heirs who could verify that they were entitled to collect.

Attorney Kabateck said he expects the list of policyholders to be posted on the Internet later this year.

Shernoff said the face value of the policies multiplied by 10 comes to about $10 million. He said that in the event there are not valid claims on all the policies, New York Life has agreed to pay the remainder, up to $10 million, to Armenian nonprofit organizations.

The attorney said Judge Snyder would have the authority to approve which organizations receive funds.

Under the settlement, New York Life would withdraw a motion it filed seeking dismissal of the suit. Among other things, the company had contended that the case should be moved to France because a number of the policies contained language stating that any disputes over the policies had to be resolved in French courts.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers had responded that it would be prohibitively costly for their clients to try to litigate in France, adding that French law has no provisions for class action suits.

In September, amid the legal wrangling, Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill sponsored by state Sen. Chuck Poochigian (R-Fresno) permitting victims of the Armenian genocide and their heirs to use California courts to pursue unpaid insurance claims. The legislation extended the statute of limitations on such claims until 2010. The measure was similar to a law passed in 1999 regarding insurance claims lodged by World War II Holocaust victims and heirs of people who were killed by the Nazis.

Shernoff, who has also filed several Holocaust-related lawsuits, said New York Life has been much more forthcoming with information than the European insurers he has dealt with in the Nazi-related cases.

On Wednesday, Martoonian said he was not sure what his share of the settlement would be or if the settlement was financially adequate. “New York Life has been stonewalling my family on this for more than 75 years,” he said.

He said his mother originally tried in 1923 to collect on a 3,000-franc policy purchased by his uncle, Setrak Cheytanian, in 1910. Cheytanian gave the policy to his mother, thinking that she could eventually collect on it, Martoonian said. “My uncle, his wife and two kids, they were all massacred,” Martoonian said.

“I have the actual policy, and I have correspondence from the company,” Martoonian said. Last year, a New York Life official said that when the family initially made a claim it had not provided adequate documentation.

New York Life’s Werfelman said the company paid claims in the past to a number of beneficiaries and heirs on policies sold to Turkish Armenians. In recent months, the company hired former Democratic Assemblyman Walter Karabian, a Los Angeles attorney and a prominent Armenian American, to help settle the suit at the suggestion of Karabian’s cousin, who is a New York Life salesman in Fresno.

The suit was initiated by Glendale attorney Vartkes Yeghiayan after reading a memoir by Henry Morgenthau about his experiences as the U.S. ambassador to Turkey during World War I.

In the book, Morgenthau described his outrage when the Turkish interior minister “made what was perhaps the most astonishing request I had ever heard.”

‘I Can Forgive, but How Can I Forget?’

Morgenthau said the minister, Talaat Bey, wanted the envoy’s assistance in getting American life insurance companies to provide a list of all their policies sold to Armenians so the Turkish government could attempt to collect on the policies because the Armenians were dead. Morgenthau wrote that he stormed out of the meeting in 1915.

On Wednesday, another plaintiff, Sam Kadorian, 93, of Van Nuys, said his mother had tried unsuccessfully for years to collect on a policy his father had purchased around 1914. “I remember distinctly that my mother and father signed the thing. I was 7 or 8 years old. They explained it to me,” said Kadorian, who came to the United States with his mother in 1920.

Kadorian said he still has a scar from a bayonet wound inflicted in 1915, about the same time his father was killed. “People say ‘forgive and forget.’ As a Christian, I can forgive, but how can I forget when I shave every day and see the patch on my right cheek?”

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Times staff writer Michael Krikorian contributed to this story.