The Only Miss Afghanistan Offers Help
Dec. 5 -- At 18, she was crowned Miss Afghanistan, was jet-setting with some of Kabul's biggest pop stars and was on her way to launching a career in radio and TV. At 25, Zohra Daoud was scrubbing the floors of a Richmond, Va., bakery — a political refugee from one of the world's most troubled hotspots.
Life's been a bit of a roller-coaster ride, but 29 years after Daoud was judged the country's most fetching beauty, the world's first and only Miss Afghanistan has weathered the trip with her grace, humor — and title — intact.
"I still hold the title," she chortles during an interview with ABCNEWS.com from her Malibu, Calif. home. "They didn't have any contests after that."
Twenty-two years of civil war, drought, famine and political repression have seen waves of Afghans fleeing their country for the squalid refugee camps of neighboring Pakistan, Iran, and to a lesser extent, Tajikistan. Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan estimated there were 7 million displaced Afghans in and around Afghanistan.
The more fortunate ones managed to make their way to the West, where they often joined relatives and old neighbors, many of them members of the Afghan elite who managed to get away soon after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Along with her husband, Mohammad Daoud, and their infant son, Daoud fled Kabul a year after the Soviet invasion. By then, she was a popular figure on the Kabul circuit, anchoring news and quiz shows for Radio Afghanistan and television, and counting among her friends politicians' children, scions from noble families and "Afghanistan's Elvis Presley," the famous pop star, Ahmad Zahir.
But with the occupation came the propagandist onslaught on the country's intelligentsia. "When the Soviets took over the radio and television, we left Afghanistan because our freedom and dignity were threatened," says Daoud.
A Bumpy Landing and the Immigrant Grind
The daughter of Afghanistan's U.S.-educated surgeon general under the reign of then King Zahir Shah, Daoud had visited the U.S. twice before fleeing Afghanistan — once on her honeymoon.
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