More than 13,000 people, mostly Turks, have signed an online petition initiated by a group of Turkish intellectuals, who issued an apology on the Internet for the World War I massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman army.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died during forced removals from what is now Eastern Turkey, but Turkey denies this was "genocide".
Stopping short of using the word "genocide", the petition, entitled 'I apologise', reads:
"My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathise with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers. I apologise to them."
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the initiative made no sense.
"They [the intellectuals] must have committed genocide because they are apologising. The Turkish Republic has no such problem," Erdogan stated.
Several Turkish diplomats and lawmakers condemned the apology and hundreds of Turks joined groups that popped up on Facebook with titles such as "I am not apologising". A foreign ministry spokesperson denied that the counterstatements were organised by the authorities.
President Abdullah Gül refrained from directly criticising the petition, saying the initiative was proof that everything could be openly discussed in Turkey.
Turkish-Armenian writer Hrant Dink was killed last year after openly saying that the events of 1915 were genocide. Before that, Dink was tried for "insulting Turkishness" under controversial legislation condemned by the EU. Orhan Pamuk, the novelist and 2006 winner of the Nobel prize for literature, was tried under similar circumstances. Pamuk said in 2005 that a million Armenians were killed in 1915, but nobody in Turkey dared to talk about it.
