Invaluable insurance policies from the Armenian Genocide are somewhere, but where?
September 3, 2000
Matter of Policy
By Michael Krikorian
In the cautious years before war shook the world in 1914, thousands of Armenians living in the Turkish Ottoman Empire purchased life insurance policies. Eight months after the start of World War I, the wholesale slaughter of Armenians began. More than a million would perish in the genocide, most of the insured among them.
What happened to those life insurance policies, said now to be worth several billion dollars?
Almost nothing.
Except for a smattering of payouts to beneficiaries, the insurance policies remain unclaimed. That's because many families were annihilated. But it's also because of unawareness, confusion, lack of paperwork and, according to several researchers, cunning deception and greed by insurance companies unwilling to part with so much money.
Now there is united energy aimed at getting to those policies written so long ago, so far away. A class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of the Armenian claimants. In addition, legislation written by state Sen. Charles Poochigian, R-Fresno, would allow heirs of victims of the Armenian Genocide who had life insurance polices to sue the insurance companies in California courts. The bill also extends the statute of limitations on these claims to 2010.
The bill, SB 1915, which passed unanimously in the Senate and the Assembly, is sailing toward Gov. Davis' cluttered desk. Davis, who has hundreds of bills awaiting his signature, is expected to sign it into law.
The bill originally included a provision that would require insurance companies, most notably New York Life Insurance, Equitable Life of New York (now named AXA Advisors) and French Union-Vie, to provide a list of Armenian clients and their policies. That element was dropped from SB 1915 because of legal complications, Poochigian said.
The search for this elusive list is not new. The hunt goes back 85 years, when forces against Armenians were seeking the list for their own benefit.
In a haunting 1915 conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Turkey during World War I, Turkish Interior Minister Talaat Bey spoke of the thousands of Armenians who had purchased life insurance policies.
"Talaat made what was perhaps the most astonishing request I had ever heard," Ambassador Henry Morgenthau recalled in memoirs published in 1918.
Bey, architect of the Armenian Genocide, told Morgenthau that he wanted "American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policyholders."
"They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money," Bey said. "The government is the beneficiary now."
A flabbergasted Morgenthau lost his temper, told Bey he would get no such list and then stormed out the room.
The Turkish state never collected the list or the money. Nor did anyone else. Since then, the details of each policy -- the amount of benefits, the names of beneficiaries -- have remained a mystery.
The search for the list goes on today. Those involved in the class-action suit seek it.
A spokesman for New York Life said it doesn't exist.
"I don't know of any such list," said William Werfelman, vice president of media relations for New York Life. He adamantly denied they were ducking policy beneficiaries.
"New York Life stands ready to review any claim by a beneficiary or person claiming to be the rightful heir to policy proceeds, just as it has been for the last 155 years," he said.
But many Armenians have grown impatient.
The class-action suit was filed in Los Angeles against New York Life on behalf of 45 people and 7,671 insurance policies issued between 1895 and 1915. Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the policies are worth more than $3 billion.
One family has been trying off and on for 77 years to collect from New York Life.
It was 1914, a year before the mass killings began, that Setrak Cheytanian, perhaps sensing oncoming doom, gave his life insurance policy to his sister-in-law, Yegas Marootian, who was bound for New York.
Years later, Marootian learned that her brother-in-law and all his immediate family had been killed by Turks June 21, 1915, in the city of Kharpert.
In 1923, she went to New York Life to collect on the policy.
"I understand that in 1923, one of the heirs contacted New York Life," Werfelman said. "It is my understanding that she was told what we would need, and we never heard from that person again."
Marootian's son said that is not the truth.
"We have copies of more than five written correspondences between my mother and New York Life," said Marty Marootian, who has taken on the crusade since his mother and older sister died in 1994.
"I don't know what that would be worth today," Marootian said of the policy, which was written for 3,000 francs and would be worth roughly $50,000 today. "Of course, it's not the money. It's just getting New York Life to respond. What they've been doing is giving us the bum's rush."
The insurance company says it wants to resolve the case.
"New York Life remains interested in solving the Marootian matter without litigation and hopes that the claimant would work in a cooperative matter to accomplish that goal," Werfelman said.
Marootian, who lives in La Canada, is 84 and tired of the whole mess.
"He hopes within his lifetime he can see some action on this," said his wife, Seda.
A lawyer for Marootian said it's all about getting the runaround. Bobbing and weaving.
"New York Life knew about it, and they've done nothing for 77 years," said Vartkes Yeghiayan, a Glendale lawyer whose interest on the insurance policies was sparked 13 years ago after reading Morgenthau's memoirs.
The French insurance company Union-Vie had 10,899 Armenians insured, many of them from the Armenian city of Kharpert. Equitable Life of New York issued an estimated 1,000 policies, Yeghiayan said.
A spokesperson for AXA Advisors (the former Equitable) would not comment on the class-action suit or the bill, other than to say lawyers "are just now in the process of reviewing Bill 1915, and it would be premature to comment at this point."
Most of the original policyholders died in the genocide. Their beneficiaries are gone, too. Only heirs remain.
As word spreads of the class action, more people have come forward. Another policy was discovered Wednesday.
"Forty-five actual heirs have contacted us, but the beauty of a class-action suit is you don't have to have every single person,'' said lead counsel Brian Kabateck of the powerful Century City firm of Quisenberry and Kabateck. "We have an excellent case, but we have a long road to go before we get there. SB 1915 will help the case."
A California State University, Fresno, professor of Armenian studies lauded the action and the new bill, but expressed concern they might add worry to many lives.
"This is a wonderful piece of legislation, but the only way to go at this is not to add extra stress on Armenians by making them scurry around looking for old insurance papers," Dickran Kouymjian said. "Class-action is the way to go, so you don't need every individual policy."
Kouymjian said the case is attracting interest in various circles, including the Armenian and legal communities.
"It will really take off when the legal community understands it is in their financial interests," he said. "SB 1915 is a great moral victory in that we had a unanimous win in the Senate and House. Still that doesn't bring us one step closer to a settlement with the insurance companies."
Poochigian said a similar 1998 bill for Jewish Holocaust survivors was the inspiration for SB 1915.
"Actually, I know a lot about the genocide, but I didn't know much about Armenian insurance policies," Poochigian said. "It came as a surprise to me."
Others also were surprised, if not amazed, that any Armenian in those harrowing times had life insurance.
When told about SB 1915, the Rev. Henry Missirlian of Fresno, a genocide survivor who was conversing just fine on other topics, had trouble grasping the idea.
"I'm a little hard of hearing. Could you repeat that slowly?" asked Missirlian, 87, who never knew his murdered parents and lived on the streets of Syria before an orphanage took him in.
He was told again about the bill.
"Are you kidding me?" he asked incredulously. He began to laugh. "I never heard of life insurance of any sort for Armenians. That's ridiculous."
When the knock comes late at night, when you're ordered out of your home at gunpoint, when you hear the shots and the neighbors' cries, documents of any kind probably wouldn't be a priority.
"Papers meant nothing," Missirlian said. "It was a matter of survival. We were breathing death through our noses and hearts every moment."
"Insurance," he muttered.
But thousands of Armenians did buy life insurance. The hard part today is finding out whether one's family had a policy and convincing the insurance companies you are the rightful heir.
To complicate matters, New York Life said it left the life insurance business in Europe after World War I by transferring all outstanding New York Life polices to English or French companies. The bulk of the transfers, most of them non-Armenian, were completed by 1922.
"Consequently, records relating to these transfers are incomplete," company spokesman Werfelman said. "New York Life makes every attempt to assist policyholders whose policy was transferred to one of these insurers."
Glendale lawyer Yeghiayan said New York Life's action would be comparable to Farmers Insurance transferring all its earthquake insurance policies immediately after the 1994 shaker in Los Angeles.
"Everybody dies and they get rid of the policies," he said. "It's ridiculous."
One Armenian professor is writing a book titled "The Unclaimed Life Insurance Policies in the Aftermath of the Armenian Genocide." Part of UCLA Professor Hrayr Karagueuzian's book was published in the August issue of the Armenian Forum, a journal of contemporary Armenian affairs.
Searching through the national archives, Karagueuzian found a document that fascinated him. It was a letter from the general counsel of New York Life to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan.
In the 1915 letter, James McIntosh writes that New York Life "has outstanding contracts of insurance with subjects of that [Turkish] Empire aggregating in the neighborhood of $10,281,134."
Karagueuzian felt the thrilling researcher's rush of discovery. He immersed himself in the subject.
He said he hopes the claimants get their money. He hopes the money from the rest of the unclaimed policies one day will go into some sort of claims organization that would be used to open an Armenian Genocide museum.
"Insurance companies cannot keep this money any longer," he said. "The money should not be wasted. That money belongs to the memory of the innocent people who died. Genocide money cannot be kept."
Fresno Bee, The (CA) Published September 3, 2000 Section: MAIN NEWS Page A1
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