Ahmet Rüstem Bey
[5] His father was an aristocrat who fled Poland after the failed revolution of 1848 and entered the Ottoman Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Sadreddin Nihad Pasha;[6] a convert to Islam, he was born Seweryn Bielinski.
Wasti stated that the family of Ahmet Rustem's maternal grandmother "is described as of Persian origin, and is possibly of Armenian antecedents.
[7] Besides his native English, Ahmet Rüstem could understand, read, and/or speak Arabic, French, German, Greek, Italian, Persian, and Turkish.
[5] Circa 1901,[9] Ahmet Rustem encountered difficulty with his employers when he decided to report financial mismanagement at the Ottoman Legation in Washington,[10] by writing an article to The Daily Mail in London and relocating to that city.
"[11] After spending periods in the UK, Malta, and Egypt, he was rehired or returned into the foreign service,[11] as Abdulhamid II lost power in the failed Ottoman countercoup of 1909,[1] and effective August 25 of that year, Ahmed Rustem became the chargé d'affaires in Washington.
Wasti wrote "The re-instatement of Ahmed Rüstem Bey indicates that the Porte had finally begun to appreciate the strict honesty and fairness that characterized him.
"[11] In 1911 he headed the embassy in Cetinje, Montenegro, but left the service to fight as a private in the Balkan Wars after the Ottoman government returned him to the empire the following year.
In September, he admitted that massacres had occurred in the past, but he argued that it was because of the Armenians' act of "political agitators engaged in undermining the Ottoman state while flaunting in the face of the government and dominant race the support of Russia, France and England.
Ahmet defended his words in a letter to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, but the Ottoman government recalled him and he left in October.
His duties were taken over by the chargé d'affaires Abdülhak Hüseyin Bey, who remained in office until the two countries severed relations on 20 April 1917 as the United States entered the war that the Ottomans had joined in November 1914.
Ahmet Rüstem Bey is the third from the right in the first row.
