The Only Miss Afghanistan Offers Help

Dec. 5, 2001 -- 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.

But when she arrived at Virginia's Norfolk International Airport in 1980 after a brief stay in Pakistan, she realized with a jolt that the honeymoon was over.

"When we came out of the airplane, they separated us from the others," she recalls. "That's when I knew: this time it's different. I'm not a regular tourist now, I'm a political asylum case. That feeling of rage and isolation... it really hit me then."

Harder knocks were to follow. With no knowledge of English, but with a degree in French literature from Kabul University, she managed to get a job in a French bakery in Richmond.

But when she arrived on the job, she was handed a mop and sent to the kitchen to do the floors. Looking back today, she jokes that she did at least succeed in making it to the front of the store — eventually.

At Home at Last and Still Not Home

Although a trained commercial pilot, her husband had to contend with working at a McDonald's and then as a taxi driver before he could restart his flying career in the U.S.

"It was a very big change for both of us and it was very hard," she admits. "From being a radio and TV star, I couldn't understand what was going on on the radio and the TV here. I felt illiterate and out of control. I told myself I had to get out of this and get real."

Reality, over the next few years, was a rush of night classes, English tutorials, flying experience, exams, new contacts, new jobs, getting the rest of the family out of Afghanistan, having babies and finally, finally settling in.

But not quite. Poised and gracious at 46 in her splendid Malibu, Calif. home more than 20 years after getting to the United States, Daoud today admits that she still suffers from a peculiar sense of alienation.

"I feel like an external object in America," she confesses. "And though I know I probably can't go back to live in Afghanistan today because I have changed so much and the country has changed so much, I still feel there's something missing, the old days are missing and I have a tremendous sense of responsibility for the country."

Helping the Homeland

It's a responsibility that compelled the Daouds to form the Afghan International Association for Professionals last month to help in the reconstruction of the war-ravaged country.

Through what could be called the bleakest years in Afghan history, after the Taliban took control of most of the country in 1996, she was on the board of the Afghan Women's Association of Southern California, fund raising for relief work, drawing attention to the Afghan humanitarian crisis, and meeting with Taliban representatives in the U.S. in vain efforts to engage with the hard-line regime to provide education and health care for women.

On a recent trip to New York to address a seminar on Afghan women organized by Women for Afghan Women, an organization founded in April this year to promote Afghan women's human rights, Daoud cautioned against rushing Western models of modernization into Afghanistan for fear of a backlash.

As the international community ponders the future of Afghanistan, Daoud is realistic about her role in the reconstruction of her homeland.

"I can't tell you tomorrow I will go to Afghanistan, because I have a family and responsibilities here," she admits. "But I would like to go back to help people, not to politically challenge them. Afghans have lived through the civil war and Taliban rule and I can't impose what I have learned in the West on them. We need to ensure that peace, stability, economic growth and respect for women's rights are delivered within the cultural values of Afghan society."