Queen for a Day

Jesse Walker | April 11, 2006

Good news from Iraq! After three years of exile, the Miss Iraq pageant has come home. Last week Tamar Goregian was crowned the new Iraqi Queen of Beauty, declaring in her acceptance speech that "Maybe beauty is the final step to end violence and preach world peace after all."

There's one snag, though:

Iraq's newly crowned beauty queen, Tamar Goregian, has decided to step down -- just four days after her election, making this the shortest reign in the pageant's 60-year history.

On April 9, the 23-year-old, who was the first Armenian Iraqi to win the Miss Iraq pageant, announced her resignation after receiving threats by a group of religious extremists who referred to her as "the queen of infidels" for participating in the contest.

The security-conscious runner-up refused to accept the title in Goregian's place, as did the woman who finished third. Pageant organizers finally persuaded Miss Teen Iraq to take the job.

[Via Jim Henley, who headlines the item "Democracy! Whisky! Sss-ubject Change!"]

Comments

|4.11.06 @ 2:17PM|#

No surprise there.

s.m. koppelman|4.11.06 @ 2:50PM|#

If this sort of thing keeps up, we'll soon see even many of Iraq's Kurds and Shiite Arabs looking back on the Saddam era with misty-eyed nostalgia the same way my Bosnian friends sometimes get about Tito.

|4.11.06 @ 2:51PM|#

There she is, our own Miss Iraq
There she is, in her veil
The fears of a million girls who are less than half bad
Can come true in old, swingin' Bagdad
For she may turn out to be a martyr by half past three, and

There she is, briefly Miss Iraq
There she is! Quick, take aim!
With so many dangers she still took the town by storm
With her well concealed face and form

And there she is
Gasping for air, she is
Rarest of the rare, she is
There she is - the now late Miss Iraq

|4.11.06 @ 3:03PM|#

"If this sort of thing keeps up, we'll soon see even many of Iraq's Kurds and Shiite Arabs looking back on the Saddam era with misty-eyed nostalgia"

Yeah, I doubt that.

|4.11.06 @ 3:07PM|#

Yeah, I doubt that.

Do you really? C'mon, there are burgeoning Stalin cults all over Russia. If you can miss a guy who killed 10 million of your people and created the largest system of political prisons in history, you can miss anybody.

|4.11.06 @ 3:13PM|#

Miss Teen Iraq shot dead today, and I'm gay--oh now come on!

|4.11.06 @ 3:18PM|#

Given Iraqi wedding customs, Miss Teen Iraq would have to be around, what, say, nine? Just wondering.

|4.11.06 @ 3:41PM|#

Brian,
I am sure some Sunni Arabs miss Saddam a whole bunch, and now that I think about it, maybe maybe some Sunni Kurds that were brought up in Baghdad or so.

But the vitriol and hatred that the Shia and the Kurds feel for Saddam is clear. Watch any of them when some Saddam trial crap comes on tv.

I bet if you told Saddam that you would release him, but in Shia or Kurd territory, he would start admitting to all his crimes.

I have heard some Kurds and Turkmen say that they wish that WE were as ruthless as Saddam.

|4.11.06 @ 6:06PM|#

Easy come. Easy go. Little high. Little low.