French insurer pays Armenian descendants
Agence France-Presse
March 5, 2010
A French insurance firm has paid compensation to descendants of
Armenians massacred in the First World War based on life insurance
policies taken at the time, a community group said Thursday.
Thousands of families applied for compensation through policies that
their ancestors bought under the Ottoman Empire from companies that
were taken over by the French firm, Axa.
Hilda Tchoboian, the head of an Armenian association in the French
city of Lyon, said Axa had agreed to pay nearly 1,000 Armenian, French
and American families, and had started sending cheques of about
$10,000 each.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed between 1915
and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey, was
falling apart. Several countries, including Canada and France, have
classified the killings as genocide.
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