In three days of Kurdish protests over Turkey's refusal to help ethnic Kurds in Syria, 31 people have died -- six times as many as in the tumultuous first two weeks of the so-called Gezi Park demonstrations across Turkey last year. Like the crushing of the Gezi Park movement, this Kurdish unrest will be a turning point.
Erdogan's approach to the defense of Kobani, an ethnically Kurdish town that is under siege by Islamic State militants just over the border in Syria, may decide whether Turkey resolves or revives the Kurdish unrest that hobbled the country's economic and political development for decades.
