Departures of note

Ahmet Rüstem Bey, born Alfred Bilinski in 1862 on Midilli (now Lesbos, Greece), was an Ottoman diplomat whose career was marked by outspokenness and controversy. Despite his Polish Jewish and British Jewish parentage, he became an ardent Turkish nationalist. His combative nature led him to challenge Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to a duel over a minor disagreement on dining etiquette, a clash that reflected his high-strung and confrontational personality.

Rüstem's diplomatic service began in 1881 as a French translator in Bulgaria, followed by postings in Athens, Belgrade, London, and Bucharest. He twice left the service to fight in wars—the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 and the Balkan Wars in 1912—serving as an honorary captain and a private respectively. In 1901, he reported financial mismanagement at the Ottoman Legation in Washington by writing to The Daily Mail, leading to accusations of treason and temporary unemployment. He was reinstated in 1909 after the fall of Abdulhamid II, and in 1914 he publicly announced his conversion from Christianity to Islam, changing his name to Ahmet Rüstem.

Appointed Ottoman ambassador to the United States in June 1914, Rüstem's first task was to defend his country's treatment of Armenians. In September, he admitted past massacres but argued they were provoked by Armenian political agitators, and he compared Ottoman actions to American treatment of blacks and Filipinos. President Woodrow Wilson took great offense, and although the U.S. did not declare him persona non grata due to the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman government recalled him. He left Washington on October 7, 1914, and his departure created a sensation in diplomatic circles.

After leaving the U.S., Rüstem wrote a book in French justifying Ottoman Armenian policy. In 1919, he joined the Turkish National Movement and worked with Mustafa Kemal at the Sivas Congress, but they had a falling out, and by September 1920 he went into voluntary exile in Europe. He never returned to Turkey, though Kemal eventually granted him a pension. He died in 1934, as reported by The New York Times, despite some sources citing 1935.