More than 2 million ethnic Armenians lived within the borders of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century. Christians in a majority Muslim society, they were subject to waves of persecution, including seizure of their land and intermittent pogroms.
The targeting of Armenians reached its apex in 1915 as leaders in the crumbling empire tried to pin the blame for military setbacks on Armenians and other minorities.
On April 24, 1915, the government rounded up approximately 250 Armenian intellectuals and leaders, eventually killing most. In the months that followed, civil and military officials forced the mass deportation of Armenian villages. Many families were marched into the Syrian desert where they starved to death or died from lack of water. The purge was accompanied by massacres that historians have said were carried out by irregular forces or locals.
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Estimates of the number of Armenians who perished vary widely, with historians offering a range of about 700,000 to 1.2 million. The U.S. government has said about 1.5 million Armenians either died or were deported. Refugees scattered around the world, with Armenian communities springing up in France, Russia, South America, the Middle East and the United States.
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What barriers have there been to its recognition?
In 1915, much of the world was focused on World War I rather than the Armenian persecution.
At the time, the word “genocide” did not exist. It wasn’t until 1943 that Polish-born lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust, coined the term for the killing of a large number of people with the aim of destroying a religious or ethnic group.
Some Armenians began public commemorations of the genocide as early as 1919, but the deaths were not well known for many decades.
Beginning in the 1960s, with the 50th anniversary of the killings, Armenians around the world began speaking out about the slaughter. Commemorating what they called Meds Yeghern — the great calamity — and convincing governments to call it a genocide became a central pillar of Armenian identity.
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Demonstrators in Los Angeles mark the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide on April 24, 2015.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The Republic of Turkey, which arose from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, steadfastly opposed efforts. While acknowledging atrocities occurred, the Turkish government objected to the use of the word “genocide,” contending that the Ottoman leadership had not directed the killings and did not have an official policy to exterminate Armenians.
In the mid-2000s, attorneys won a pair of legal settlements for $37.5 million in the names of Armenian genocide victims. But families who stepped forward to collect on behalf of ancestors in one settlement had their claims rejected at an astonishing rate of 92%.
Authorities might tax Armenians to the brink of starvation, seize their assets, and even kill them. But as long as they had insurance policies with companies beyond the Ottoman Empire’s borders — in New York, Paris, London and Berlin — many Armenians could rest assured that their families would be provided for.
As violence against them surged in the years leading up to the genocide, Armenian breadwinners continued traveling to Constantinople — modern-day Istanbul — and other cities to pay their premiums.
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Why haven’t there been more genocide reparations cases?
The reason that genocide reparations cases were filed in California in the first place has to do with a state law signed by Gov. Gray Davis in 2000. Known as SB 1915, the law revived the statute of limitations for Armenian genocide victims or their heirs and gave them until 2010 to pursue claims for unpaid insurance money in California courts.
After the law passed, insurance companies in the U.S. and Europe were hit with a slew of class-action lawsuits from survivors and their families. New York Life and Paris-based AXA settled for millions of dollars. Others refused. Munich Re, a German insurance giant, sought to dismiss a class-action against it.
The company argued that by explicitly providing a path of redress to Armenian genocide victims, the California law conflicted with and usurped the U.S. government’s long-standing and hotly contested posture of not officially recognizing the genocide.
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In 2012, a federal appellate court agreed with Munich Re and concluded that the state law intruded on federal powers in a particularly contentious area of foreign affairs.
The decision abruptly ended any chance of holding insurance companies and banks liable for mistreating genocide victims — so long as the federal government refused to recognize the Armenian genocide.
Since Biden acknowledged the genocide last year, some attorneys have considered filing a new round of cases.
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Matt Hamilton is a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting with colleagues Harriet Ryan and Paul Pringle and was part of the team of reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. A graduate of Boston College and the University of Southern California, he joined The Times in 2013.
Harriet Ryan is a former investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. During her 17 years at the paper, she wrote about high-profile people, including Phil Spector, Michael Jackson and Tom Girardi, and institutions, including USC, the State Bar of California, the Catholic Church, the Kabbalah Centre and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting with colleagues Matt Hamilton and Paul Pringle in 2019. She and Hamilton won the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability in 2023. She previously worked at Court TV and the Asbury Park Press. She is a graduate of Columbia University.
