St. Louis’ Legacy as an Asylum for Refugees

One winter afternoon in 1995, fifteen and a half-year-old Hedija went down to the river by her house to do her family’s washing. Like other rural Bosnians, she always did her laundry by hand. Hedija’s baby was by her side when, suddenly, she heard the noise of a bomb falling overhead. She knew from it’s sound that it had fallen nearby—a whistling indicated that the bomb had gone by and she was safe, while booming meant that it was dangerously close.

“So I was looking for the bomb, and I saw it— the big bomb. And I just thought oh my gosh.” Turning inside, Hedija saw that the explosive had fallen inside her kitchen. “I went back and I opened the kitchen cabinet and I just started to… You know, you’re in shock, and your baby’s right there…”

Still holding a piece of clothing from her laundry, Hedija looked down and saw that the garment had been ripped in the course of the bomb’s flight. The bomb had crossed her porch, destroying its wooden railing and passing close enough to Hedija to graze her leg, before coming to a rest inside the kitchen cabinet.

Hedija now forms part of St. Louis’ prominent community of Bosnian refugees. Mainly concentrated in the Bevo Mill neighborhood in south St. Louis, colloquially known as “Little Bosnia,” the Bosnian-American population surpassed 70,000 in 2013, making the city home to the largest concentration of Bosnians outside of Europe. The influx of Bosnians began twenty years ago, during the country’s bloody 1992-1995 civil war. Most St. Louis Bosnians belong to the Bosniak ethnic group, a majority- Muslim community that bore the brunt of the war’s violence. Two decades after the war and subsequent migration, many Wash U students may be unaware of this significant event that changed both the city and our campus. The presence of Bosnian refugees is especially strong on the South 40, where over half of the housekeeping staff is from Bosnia.

Though Hedija is now one such member of Wash U’s housekeeping staff, she lived in the mid-sized city of Goražde between 1992 and 1995. Aged twelve at the breakout of war, she says that every Bosnian family was touched by the violence. “We were okay, me and my siblings. But [my cousin] got killed. He was just driving a bike. He was the sweetest person ever. He wouldn’t kill an ant.” Hedija’s cousin was killed at a post office one city over when he left Goražde to pick up legal papers for his brother. Hedija remembers the morning that he left. “He had just had a little baby. He was sitting on the floor. And he said ‘I don’t want to go’ and his mother said ‘but you have to go.’ She was covered, and he’d mess up her headscarf. She said ‘stop!’ and she’d hit him.” Hedija mimed an affectionate swat. His baby had been lying in a cradle. “He took the whole cradle in his arms with his daughter—he didn’t want to leave. And he left and he never came back.”

After the civil war, Bosnia remained in disarray. Widespread destruction led Hedija and thousands of other Bosnians to leave the country, searching for better jobs and greater stability. “They kept saying it was safe, but it still wasn’t safe, you know, because the Serbs took all the hills in Bosnia. They could see everything, and they bombed mosques, they bombed schools, they bombed ambulances.”

Both Hedija and her colleague Amira, who help maintain Lee-Beaumont residential college, entered the U.S. via Germany after applying to be accepted as refugees. Hedija was sent to St. Louis as part of her refugee program, while Amira came because her sister already lived in the area. In the early 1990s, the federal government selected St. Louis to be the primary American city to receive Bosnian refugees. According to Patrick McCarthy of Saint Louis University, the city was an ideal destination because of its good housing stock and the availability of non-language-based jobs.

Though the assimilation of refugees into the community was rapid and rocky, many feel that the results have been overwhelmingly positive. In his book Ethnic St. Louis, McCarthy argues that the influx of refugees to the city has stabilized neighborhoods, led to the creation of new businesses and has enriched the city’s culture.

When asked in an interview with Fox 2 News in the Morning whether the Bosnian refugee crisis of the ‘90s had parallels with the current situation in Syria, McCarthy argued that the issues were “more similar than different.” In both cases, the refugees were in desperate need of asylum.

He and hundreds of other St. Louisans believe that the acceptance of Syrian refugees to the city can yield equally positive results if they are welcomed with effort and commitment. In a rally on September 13, hundreds of people protested the unreasonably low cap on refugees that will be accepted into the area, asserting that the city of St. Louis has the resources to accept at least 60,000 Syrians.

According to McCarthy, the success of the Bosnian assimilation “says something very good about St Louis and about the Bosnians who came here.”