Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Lansing Papers, 1914–1920, Volume I

701.6711/88

The Turkish Ambassador (Rustem) to the Secretary of State

Washington, September 12, 1914.

Sir: Referring to the conversation I had with you yesterday morning I beg to make the following statement:

The remarks attributed to me in the cutting from the Star which you handed to me and which I hereby return are a faithful reproduction of language used by me.

I am fully aware that the course I followed in pointing through the press to certain unfortunate happenings in the United States was an unusual one. But so is the situation against which I desired to react in the interest of both Turkey and this Country.

For years past, Turkey has been the object of systematic attacks on the part of the press of the United States. These attacks, conceived very frequently in the most outrageous language, spare her in none of her feelings. Her religion, her nationality, her customs, her past, her present are reviled. She is represented as being a sink of iniquity. Excesses which have occurred in her midst and which I, with all other educated Ottomans, deeply deplore but of which there are parallels without the same excuses in the life of other nations constitute an inextinguishable theme of violent denunciation of her.

This attitude of the press has poisoned public opinion in the United States in regard to the Turkish people to such an extent that a member of that race is seldom thought or spoken of in this country otherwise than as the “unspeakable” and when Turkey, defeated and bleeding as the result of the Balkan War, was in need of a kind word, mockery and insult of the most cruel nature were poured upon her by almost every American paper.

So far, the distance which separates the two countries has protected the Turkish people from a knowledge of the implacable treatment it was receiving at the hands of the American press, but today, when every eye and ear is strained in Turkey as well as in every other part of Europe to detect signs of the attitude of the United States, the only great Power which has remained neutral in the present conflict of nations, echoes are reaching even the most retired in Turkey of the malignant voices raised against her so persistently in the daily and periodical literature of this country.

As, on the other hand, this is a period when racial and nationalist passions are intensely alive, it is greatly to be feared that these provocations of the United States press added to the effect produced by the sale of the Idaho and Mississippi to Greece at a time when her relations were extremely strained with Turkey and the rumors that the United States were on the point of making a naval demonstration in Turkish waters may cause a strong reaction in the feeling of friendship entertained so far by the Turkish people for the United States. What is particularly unfortunate is that the press of this country should so persistently indulge in false accusations of a projected massacre en masse of Christians in Turkey. To the baser elements of the Turkish population the perpetual agitation of this calumny may finally act as a suggestion to do the thing it was not thinking of doing and this all the more as it is in the name of Christianity that Turkey has been practically condemned to be an outlaw among nations.

The Imperial Government who has only taken notice of the anti-Turkish excesses in the United States to express the pain they have caused it, is fully conscious of its duties at this critical moment. But the press of a country in the van of civilization like the United States and one officially engaged in circumscribing the present storm should not render the task of the Sublime Porte more difficult than it is. It was imperative to make a strong effort to bring it to a more responsible view of its relationship to Turkey. The Administration is notoriously helpless against the press. It was for the Turkish Ambassador to act.

In proceeding as I did it cannot be fairly said that I attacked or even criticised the United States. It is clear that I was defending my country against an American attack and if my mode of defense was to show that the United States has also things to reproach herself with and to specify those things it appeared to me that it was the only way of inducing the press of this country to take a more charitable view of the Turkish people whose defects are compensated by sterling virtues.

I may have transgressed diplomatic rules but the occasion was one in which I firmly believe that it was not only pardonable but legitimate to depart from conventionalities. The interests of humanity cannot be sacrificed to form.

I am conscious of having fulfilled my moral duty to Turkey, to the United States and to humanity at large.

Accept [etc.]

A. Rustem

[Enclosure]

Statement by the Turkish Ambassador (Rustem) as Published in the Washington “Evening Star,” September 8, 1914

“According to the newspapers, Great Britain, following in the footsteps of France, has agitated before the eyes of the United States the specter of a massacre of Christians in Turkey, and has made this gruesome picture of the immediate future, drawn with absolute disregard to truth, a pretext for requesting the United States to dispatch warships to Turkish ports. That there have been massacres in Turkey I cannot, unfortunately, deny, but the Armenians and Maronites who were the victims, suffered at the hands of the Moslems, not as Christians, but as political agitators engaged in undermining the Ottoman state, the while flaunting in the face of the government and dominant race the support of Russia, France and England.

“Under the same provocation what would Russia have done, who has given the world the spectacle of not one but twenty programs [pogroms] against an innocent race; what France, who smoked to death in caverns the Algerians fighting for the independence of their land, who later on rejoiced in that grand production, the Commune; what England, whose punishment of the ‘rebels’ in the Indian ‘mutiny’ was to blow them off guns?

“And, since a large number of American papers are siding with Great Britain and France in this affair, I will permit myself to say that the thought of the lynchings which occur daily in the United States and the memory of the ‘watercures’ in the Philippines should make them chary of attacking Turkey in connection with acts of savagery committed by her under provocation compared with which the economic competition of an Italian or the sniping of a Filipino, or even the outrage of a negro, are as nothing.

“Supposing, for the sake of argument, what in reality could never happen, that the negroes were discovered to be engaged in a conspiracy with the Japanese to facilitate the invasion of the United States by the latter, how many of them would be left alive to tell the tale?

“Great Britain and France have embarked upon a new campaign of provocation against Turkey, secretly hoping that as a result of it something untoward may happen in that country to confirm their sinister predictions, so that the United States will be finally prevailed upon to dispatch warships to the Levant and thus get mixed up in the European fray on the allies’ side, but I believe the administration too sagacious to fall into such a vulgar trap.

“Besides, why should the United States, not one of whose citizens has ever suffered in Turkey, send warships in the waters of that country, with the result that it would only cause irritation against her and could under no circumstances act as a check? Bombard Smyrna, Beirut, which are mostly inhabited by Christians? What of that? And what more could she do? Nothing. But that would be enough to mean war. Do the people of the United States want war?

“The new British move against Turkey is clumsy. It will not cause the United States to modify its attitude. But it has called forth the following telegram from New York to the Turkish embassy.

“‘If Turkey goes to war against England, the Hindoos and Mussulmans in India and elsewhere will support her in every way. Thousands of volunteers ready.

“‘Bhayankar,
“‘Gadar National Volunteers,
“‘57 East 200th Street.’”