Muslim refugees of another era could put Missouri in play for Clinton

When Greta Morina sees images of Aleppo on TV, she thinks of her hometown, Pristina.

“It makes you flash back. It’s intense,” Morina says. “You’re hearing gunshots, bombs being dropped, you smell smoke. You’re seeing groups of people carrying their belongings, their children all into packed tents.”

Morina is now 22. She became a refugee during the 1990s ethnic cleansing campaigns carried out by Serbian nationalists in the former Yugoslavia. She and her family, who are ethnic Kosovars, were resettled in St. Louis in the early 2000s. They joined a growing community of Bosniaks, Kosovars and Bosnian Roma who were displaced by the same conflict.

Today that community has grown to an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 people — primarily Bosniaks, one of the largest such communities in the world outside the Balkans — and in recent years has emerged as a recognizable voting bloc in local politics. Heading into November’s presidential election, St. Louis’ Bosniak and Kosovar communities are near-universally turned off by Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim refugee rhetoric and are skeptical of the candidate’s popularity among Serbian nationalists.

Read more: http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-22/muslim-refugees-another-era-could-put-missouri-play-clinton