DEBT, DEATH, AND DISASTER: INSIDE THE 2002 MISS WORLD PAGEANT

Some people might have thought twice about flying 90 scantily clothed beauty queens into the capital of a predominantly Muslim country during the holy month of Ramadan. Not Julia Morley, organizer of the Miss World Pageant, who thought she had a lucrative deal in Nigeria. In the capital city of Abuja and in London, to which the horrified young contestants fled, Judy Bachrach discovers how a little ignorance led to bloody riots, with 250 dead, thousands injured, and a 21-year-old journalist running for her life.

BY JUDY BACHRACH

MARCH 2003

DIVA DANGER
A security guard stands by as, from left, Miss Argentina, Miss Gibraltar, and Miss Aruba watch a regatta in Calabar, Nigeria, November 17, 2002. The Miss World contestants were not allowed out of their hotels without chaperons. By Boris Heger/A.P. Images.

It isn’t turning out to be the usual sort of beauty contest. Lively Miss Canada, her thick blond hair swept into a ponytail, is startled by the meager hotel accommodations in Calabar, Nigeria, where, deprived of a fitness center, the young women have to run laps through the halls. There are seditious toilets and arid showers, mute telephones, a total absence of newspapers, and—in every room—a television set that features only one station, and that one devoted to music videos exclusively. “We were basically in isolation for 10 days,” Miss Canada reports, and this perturbs her because she is by nature inquisitive. And different. In high school, Canada used to play tackle football on a boys’ team and coach a boys’ soccer team.

That, by the way, is how the 90 contestants refer to one another—they leave off the “Miss,” so that during downtime, of which there is plenty, you hear cries from what sounds like a shrill oral primer in modern geography: “Hey, Czech Republic!”; “Hey, Slovakia!”; “Over here, Latvia and Kazakhstan!” Or still better—this from Germany, a small, scrappy model who favors running pants that read “NYC” across her small bottom—“South Africa, thank God you’re here!” And with that, South Africa, a willowy blonde with a long tangle of curls, and a gentle smile, and wearing an incredibly tiny jeans skirt, patiently proceeds to apply a perfect coat of makeup to her charge—an application that takes a good hour.

Beauty competition though this is, rivalry is rarely in evidence among the girls. Generous grooming, the contemporary woman’s sedative, becomes, in this charged and lonely atmosphere, practically a philanthropic activity. Colombia carefully ministers to Ecuador with layer upon layer of bright peach blusher and Chanel lip liner. Chile agrees to share her electric eyelash curler. Gibraltar swaps her clothes. And France, a Catherine Deneuve look-alike, proudly shows off her jewelry—proudly because none of it has set her back by much. “The necklace, 63 francs from Bon Marché—pas mal, n’est-ce pas? And the bracelets? France points to a host of delicately beaded bangles floating from one milky arm—“a gift from Meees India.”

So this is where they all are: in the middle of the tropical and malarial rain-forest belt of West Africa. It is the holy Muslim month of Ramadan in Nigeria, where 50 percent of the population is Muslim. Quite ignorant of the country outside their hotel, the lovely women wait in heat and isolation for the chance to be crowned Miss World. Miss Argentina complains of nausea from malaria pills, but it’s clear she thinks it is a sacrifice worth making. Miss England, an Oxford biology student, with a shroud of dark hair and a sweet placid face—deceptively placid, it will turn out—is of a similar opinion. She just assumes “it will be a very glamorous event, and we will be treated, you know, just like beauty queens.”

Who can doubt it? “Welcome to Nigeria. Welcome to God’s own country!” booms Jerry Gana, Nigeria’s information minister, when the girls finally arrive in Abuja, the normally tranquil capital. This is where the actual beauty contest is supposed to be held, at the International Conference Center. A red carpet is rolled out on the tarmac of the Nnamdi Azikwe International Airport. It is 94 degrees. The girls examine their beautifully polished finger nails, and each considers the intricacies of her own particular situation. Miss Germany, who was in fact born in Bosnia (“My parents are German, I am not German,” she explains), is longing for the arrival of her evening gown. This had to be obtained at the last minute by “running all over Germany” (she was second runner-up, and modeling in Turkey when word came down that the top two winners had bowed out for personal reasons).

Miss Belgium, a dark-haired economics student with exquisite bone structure and a job as a waitress back in Brussels, is counting pennies. She too was but a runner-up, and therefore, as she declares mournfully, “The original Miss Belgium won the car.” Despite this, the winner refused to come to Nigeria, and here is Sylvie Doclot, car-deprived and spending weeks in a strange place without earning a single euro. But hoping—just hoping, as she points out—to win “and meet all sorts of important people, who might give me jobs.”

Miss World contestants face the media in a hastily arranged press conference at their London hotel on November 25, the day after they flew in from Nigeria. Pageant head Julia Morley, center, calls herself a “tough bitch.”

From News Syndication.
But what people? Who is there to meet? The languor of their days leaves many of the girls distracted and faintly unsettled. Activities include weaving baskets with which they are supposed to fish, a visit to a governor’s mansion, and pottery-making. There is a drop-by at Kwa Falls, where contestants pose elegantly, modeling unobjectionable swimsuits (nonetheless, this was not Lynsey Bennett’s—Miss Canada’s—“favorite thing,” she tells me). But mostly, a great deal of time is spent languishing in hotel rooms, of which the contestants have become connoisseurs. The Nicon Hilton in Abuja boasts better TVs and a fitness center, but has its own peculiarities: vast rooms hemmed in by shiny red walls and equally brilliant black ceilings, all sealed by fluorescent orange doors, behind which stand, at all times, stern-faced guards.

It is in one of these colorful chambers that Daniella Luan, Miss England, finds herself all alone at lunchtime during the third week of last November, whiling away the hours. No surprise to find her indoors. “We were not allowed to go to the swimming pool without a chaperon,” Luan recalls. “I never went to the fitness center once.” Every elevator ride is manned by a Nigerian guard, and at no time is anyone allowed to leave the hotel except for official activities.

On November 21, Luan switches on her TV set—CNN—and sees for the first time what’s actually going on in Nigeria, some 100 miles away from her fluorescent orange door. Machetes. Blood. Churches set afire by enraged Muslims. Bystanders “necklaced” with burning tires. Mosques burned to the ground. “People attacking people,” she says. Hundreds of them. All this is occurring in Kaduna, but it will spread the next day to Abuja. And it all seems, somehow or other, connected with the Miss World beauty pageant. “Down with beauty!” scream the rioters. “Miss World is sin! Allahu Akbar!”

“I’ve never felt so alone in my life,” Luan tells me.

Miss England reveals what she has just seen on TV only to her roommate, the flabbergasted Rebekah Revels, Miss U.S.A., “because Mrs. Morley told us to keep our feelings under wraps,” says Luan, referring to the pageant organizer, Julia Morley. Miss U.S.A., in turn, calls her father, J. D. Revels, back home in North Carolina. “Get home immediately,” he orders.

But Miss U.S.A., a fairly short contestant with a round face, dark hair scraped in a French knot, and an armored demeanor, energized by frequent infusions of gospel music from her Walkman, clearly has other plans. None of these include flying home precipitately. Fresh from a disastrous attempt at becoming Miss North Carolina in the Miss America contest (an ex-boyfriend thwarted her winning bid by threatening to release topless photographs of her, which, she claims, had been taken without her consent), she is evidently not the type to abandon this second bid for stardom. She has her dreams—among them, as she would later confide to the entire Miss World audience: “I would love to know that when I come back home, New York was waiting for me.” She also has her strategy mapped out—a rendition of “Kumbaya” and an especially tender plea to the judges. “I admonish you to pick me,” Revels would eventually plead with them. “I have the faith, strength, and determination to be the best Miss World—ever!”

By the end of the contestants’ stay, charred bodies lie in the streets, and plumes of smoke rise from burning cars two miles away from the hotel. Apparently a Nigerian journalist has written an article, bitterly offensive to Muslim fundamentalists, about the beauty pageant, and this is what has set off the riots. Miss Canada finds out about the carnage only because she happens to call her parents back home on her cell phone to say hi. “Are you all right?” are the first words from her frantic parents.

“What do you mean, am I all right?” she wonders.

After Miss Canada’s second call home, the next morning, she is not at all inclined to keep what she has learned to herself—or to stick around Nigeria. She pours out the details to Paula Murphy, Miss Scotland, who has porcelain skin and a medical degree.

“If you’re going, I’m going,” announces Miss Scotland. Word gets around. More and more teary-eyed girls huddle together, wanting to leave. More and more Nigerians die.

“So first 15 deaths,” recalls Miss Belgium, who, like her fellow contestants, gapes ceaselessly at CNN, “and then, non!—it’s 50 deaths.” And then, as she will later discover, 250 dead. Miss Belgium spends a sleepless night. The next morning, everyone notices, the hotel is ringed by yet more guards. “If something really bad is going on, I’m going to be the first one out of here,” she tells her chaperon. “I don’t want to be the pretext for these killings.” She is told not to worry. But the death toll keeps mounting, more and more killings. And still they aren’t leaving Nigeria.

“It all had to do with ... ,” says Caroline Chamorand, Miss France, rubbing her thumb against her other fingers in the classic gesture for money. The two young women share, aside from language, a kind of genial cynicism about their experiences abroad.

“So I said, ‘Ah, non! That’s too much,’” Miss Belgium continues. “And I made a reservation for a plane out that night. But the Belgian ambassador came for over three hours to convince me to stay. Because he felt journalists had exaggerated the situation, and Belgium wanted me to stay. And why should we leave just to please a small minority? It wouldn’t be good for the people of Nigeria.” The ambassador’s pitch leaves Doclot quite unconvinced. But she has missed her plane.

There are those—lithe Miss Israel is one—who are willing to stay on and face whatever comes. “You know what’s happening in Israel,” Carol Lowenstein says by way of explanation, with a light shrug. But she is an exception. It isn’t merely fear that drives many contestants. There is a sense of shared responsibility. What are they all doing here in Nigeria? What possessed them to come, in their tight skirts and jeans, during the month of Ramadan? Miss Canada asks and asks, “but no one really had a clear answer,” she says.

The pageant starts to resemble a wake. Gone Miss Canada, who is whisked off by the Canadian high commissioner. Gone Miss Korea, equally distraught. As riots spread, the pageant decides to fly the remaining girls to London on a chartered jet. Immediately. And none too soon. Miss Belgium speaks for a fair number of the contestants when she says: “I mean, look, I know we weren’t responsible for the killings, but we were tied to them.”

It’s a notion she still can’t shake when she arrives safely in London. A few missteps borne of ignorance leading to ineradicable tragedy. All the goodwill in the world can’t change that.

Two weeks later, Julia Morley glances, stricken, at her watch and frantically punches in a series of numbers on her cell phone. It is 1:40 P.M., and Azra Akin, the freshly crowned Miss World (favorite hobbies: belly dancing and playing the flute), is about to be introduced at her first official function, a large London charity event.

Except that Miss World, a tender, docile girl (which must be a real plus in Morley’s eyes, considering the mutinous nature of some of Akin’s fellow contestants), is now 90 minutes late and nowhere to be found. This in itself is astonishing, since she is hard to miss: five feet ten inches, with a torrent of black curls falling past luminous shoulders she highlights with skin cream. But she is not in the lobby of the Hilton, where the charity event is taking place: we have searched every corner. Not in the ladies’ room. Not in her hotel, across town. Hastily, charity staffers are dispatched to all hotel entrances, only to straggle back, blank-faced. Where in the world is Miss World?

Contestants check out of the Nicon Hilton in Abuja, Nigeria, November 23, 2002, before leaving for London. By Saurabh Das/A.P. Images.

Morley is an amiable 61-year-old with the unlined face and almost impenetrable innocence of a very young girl. Right now, however, her large eyes appear bright with the threat of tears. Before her, untouched, lies a plate of smoked salmon, a dry, stiffening reproach. Everything, but everything, that could possibly go wrong has done so. She is the object of unrelenting scorn in the press, blamed for all catastrophes, large and small. The deaths in Nigeria. Indifference to human rights. Religious strife. Outraged contestants. Even Prince Edward, who was supposed to show up at an earlier gala, swiftly bowed out.

Morley likes to call herself a “tough bitch,” but she is in fact nothing of the sort. Over the years, her organization has raised more than $240 million for charity. Where, she wonders, did she go wrong? She went to Nigeria, a country she loathed on first inspection, only because, she says, on a second visit she realized “it was a young democracy” with inhabitants “I felt so sorry for.” And, of course, the money. There was a considerable amount of that awaiting her. In theory.

“I’ve had a lot of pressures this time,” Morley says between sips of Bordeaux. “This had the nasty sort of freaky underlying possibilities, which is never really what I’m used to. It was”—her beautiful hands leave her wineglass to convey the universal gesture of helplessness—“beyond our control.”

“Nasty” is frankly a euphemism here. Aside from the hundreds who died in Nigeria, thousands were injured, and thousands more displaced. Isioma Daniel, a terrified 21-year-old journalist, is currently under fatwa, a Muslim death decree, issued by the Nigerian state of Zamfara, because she dared to write, of Morley’s lovely charges, “What would Muhammad think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them.” That is when, as Daniel’s mother, Ndidi, recalls, the riots started, and “all hell let loose.” It was, declared a top official, “binding on all Muslims ... to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty.”

Morley doesn’t think she’s responsible for any one of these tragedies—a conviction not shared by the British tabloids (“swimwear dripping with blood” is how one writer described the competition; SCRAP MISS WORLD, read one typical headline). How was the pageant chairman to know what some journalist was going to write? Or that Nigeria’s Muslim population, most of whom live in the North, abide by the harsh strictures of Sharia law? Or that these people, 66 percent of whom live below the poverty line, might take umbrage at the appearance of 90 beauties, their flat bellies bared over tight jeans during the holy month of Ramadan?

“To tell you the truth, before I left I thought Sharia was a girl’s name,” says Morley. “I did! I swear to you! I was totally ignorant. I got into big-shit trouble because I hardly realized what I was letting myself in for. That’s the honest truth.”

Abruptly her face crumples again. The M.C. is about to present an invisible Miss World to 300 guests. It is a measure of the desperation and panic now besetting her that Morley signals me with a hissed plea: “Listen. When they announce Miss World, I want you to stand up and wave!”

Alas, this is about as inspired a notion as flying scores of pretty girls to Nigeria during Ramadan. Miss World is 21, Turkish, olive-skinned, generally dressed in a ball gown, and as slim as a fading hope. She has been seen, claims the pageant’s Web site, by roughly two billion people worldwide, not counting her appearances after the coronation on the BBC, CNN, and ITV. These points are raised with Morley.

“Doesn’t matter. You just stand up when they call Miss World.” Morley is adamant. Even so, one can see her eyes narrow as they sweep the room for more eligible substitutes.

Fortunately, at this moment Azra Akin wafts in, draped in a length of stormy gray chiffon. She and her grim-faced chaperon went to the wrong London Hilton, it turns out, where they waited patiently. Despite this, the beauty queen appears as tranquil and unrattled as though she were on holiday, her face shining with quiet triumph. She takes her bow.

Unappeased, Morley murmurs, “Next time they do something like that, they’re going to find themselves at the bottom of the sea in a pair of concrete shoes.”

Morley cannot believe this avalanche of misfortune. Bad enough that, once the troubles started, she had on her hands rebellious beauties who actually snubbed or defected from the pageant. “It’s disgusting that people have lost their lives because of Miss World,” said Masja Juel, Miss Denmark, who boycotted the event. Added to Morley’s other woes is the delicate matter of money. Silverbird, a Nigerian media company that created a consortium to sponsor the pageant, has not paid her most of a promised £5 million ($8 million). “I haven’t received five million pennies,” complains Morley. She has just spent $1.6 million rescuing her bevy of girls from the riots and setting up an alternative pageant in London.

And to top it all off, she is being sued in London’s High Court by a Nigerian businesswoman who insists Morley owes her $800,000 for the charity dinner at which Prince Edward failed to show.

“It really is awful to see this vast country and realize the people are not very honest,” Morley concludes glumly about Nigeria. And yet “I talked to the government, I talked to the ministers. They all said, ‘Come to Nigeria!’”

A fatal invitation, in the opinion of Donald Trump, who should know. It was he who purchased the rival Miss Universe contest six years ago for $10 million, turning it into the cash cow he now claims is worth 10 times the purchase price. And he marvels over Morley’s decision to fly her girls to Nigeria. “They’ve been so tarnished by the stupidity of the location!” he tells me. Once, Trump says, he tried to buy Miss World, either to run it himself or to kill it outright. But he wouldn’t consider such a purchase now. Not unless the price was ridiculously low. “You can’t go to Nigeria—everyone knows that. Because of the religious situation,” he says. Besides, “how are they supposed to get £5 million? The Nigerians don’t have it to pay!”

And the worst of it is that Morley knows that much of what people are saying about her decision to go to Nigeria is horribly true. “I’m not blaming anyone else, mind you. I blame only myself. I’m the asshole here,” she says. “But”—her childish green eyes widen further—“I only had a year in which to learn!”

From time to time, Morley and her financial adviser wonder what her late husband, the shrewd entrepreneur Eric Morley, who founded the event, might make of her latest adventure. They can practically hear his words as he looks down on them: “What a fine mess you’ve got yourselves into now!”

Miss Turkey, Azra Akin, who is Muslim, reigns as Miss World in London on December 7, 2002, while Miss Norway kisses her and Miss Peru looks on. By Alastair Grant/A.P. Images.

As the Miss World Pageant is 52 years old, one would think that by now it might be well versed in the ways of selecting suitable host countries and sponsors. But Julia Morley is right in a way: she had to learn fast. During her husband’s lifetime she wasn’t given all that much power within the organization, and whatever influence she had was generally wielded through stealth by quietly circumventing her husband’s desires: bikinis, bosoms, heels. “The fun was going around and sabotaging this male ego,” she says. “That sounds awful, but it’s true.”

Two years ago her husband died at 82. Eric, orphaned as a Cockney child (“Nobody wanted me,” he once said), grew up to be a slick impresario. In 1951 he devised the pageant as a patriotic swimsuit tribute designed to lift England out of its postwar doldrums. He also liked to claim that the show was a kind of Olympic decathlon, although the comparison left many puzzled. Girls back then were judged almost exclusively on their proportions and their facility at swiveling in heels and bathing suits while Morley shouted, “A quarter-turn! And turn! And turn again!”

“It used to make me cringe,” recalls his wife of 40 years, who got rid of that onstage swimsuit rotation (as well as the onstage swimsuits themselves, eventually) by telling the contestants to remain mulishly still when the commands to turn came. Eric Morley, says Julia, who married him when she was 19, was “a complete chauvinist pig.”

This, however, is said with affection. Julia, whose maiden name is Pritchard, was an unwed mother, a graduate, as she puts it, “of the university of hard knocks,” when the marriage proposal came from the suitor more than two decades her senior. But Eric considered Julia’s child as much his own as the four who came after the wedding. The fifth, an adopted girl named Kathryn, died at 17 of a progressive central-nervous-system disease.

So their marriage survived a lot—among other things a long-standing affair between Eric and a much younger woman. “Oh, so he had leg-overs with the birds—I’m sure he did,” Julia Morley says dismissively. “I mean, he was a bloke, wasn’t he? That’s what blokes do. But he never had one”—she holds up a warning hand—“with a Miss World contestant.”

Indeed, it was the very blokiness of the contest creator, says his widow, that accounted for the way his brainchild was handled in its earlier days. Eric’s secretaries had to wear very short skirts, no pantsuits allowed. His widow grins. “You have to remember the show was run by a production team that was all male. The BBC was all male. ITV was all male. Looking back, it must have been really comfortable because everyone knew their place.”

By 1970, however, that place became a messy and confusing arena. That year a group of feminists stormed the Miss World stage in London, carrying placards, stink bombs, and tomatoes, just as the show’s M.C., Bob Hope, was informing the Royal Albert Hall audience, “It’s been quite a cattle market and I’ve been out there checking calves.” Hurled bags full of flour greeted this observation, and it was only because Julia Morley’s hands were gripped tightly around Hope’s ankles that the startled comedian didn’t turn heel and flee the stage.

One could argue that the pageant never wholly recovered, although it certainly had its moments. In 1972, Lynda Carter (eventually TV’s Wonder Woman) competed in its finals. That same year, Gay Mei-Lin, who competed as Miss Hong Kong, was revealed to have been born a man. A decade ago, the actress Joan Collins, a pageant judge, was heard to whisper to a colleague, “For young girls they’ve got the worst bottoms I’ve ever seen. I would rather die than have to do this.” And just four years ago, Miss Angola, asked what she would do if she won, erupted with “Party! Party! House! Mercedes!”

By then, in any event, Miss World seemed to have run out of steam in its home country, where more than 20 million had once watched it. The show vanished from the BBC, then from ITV (which cited sexism). And the problem is, says Donald Trump, who currently revels in a five-year, $78 million contract with NBC for Miss Universe, “you need a major network to broadcast. No one saw Miss World in the United States.”

This is amazingly disingenuous on his part, since, as Morley tells me, “every single time I’d try to put my head up, Trump used to try and blow it off. He actually took action against me.” Trump, significantly, doesn’t deny having ruined Morley’s American prospects, but then, compared with him, she is such a babe in the woods. Let her cringe over the sensibilities of contestants parading onstage in swimsuits and heels. Trump, for his part, is enthusiastic on the subject: “All I can say is, when I took over, the heels got higher and the bathing suits got smaller, and the ratings went through the roof.”

Undeterred, the Morleys looked elsewhere: to satellite television, Third World countries, vast markets in Latin America (where franchised Miss World beauty schools still flourish), Asia, and Africa. Pageants were held in the Seychelles, South Africa, and India, where—shades of the nightmare to come—a man was reported to have burned himself in protest in 1996.

‘Beauty with a Purpose” was how Julia Morley described the revamped contest. At the same time, a number of the pretty contestants actually turned out to be more purposeful and sophisticated, and as a result often less tractable, as Morley swiftly discovered this year.

In fact, practically the first call Miss Scotland made on winning her title was to Amnesty International. Should she boycott the pageant in Nigeria? she wondered. She had heard about a Nigerian woman named Amina Lawal, who had borne a child out of wedlock and was consequently sentenced last March to be “buried up to her neck and pelted with heavy rocks until she dies.” This sentence, passed by the northern state of Katsina under Sharia law, is supposed to be carried out in 2004, after the mother has weaned her child. And Lawal is not the only woman facing death for such an offense in Nigeria. Should I avoid such a country? Murphy asked at the time.

It was a question Julia Morley, almost four decades Murphy’s senior, would have been wise to ask herself at the outset. But she knew nothing when the contract with Nigerian television was signed. Later, naturally, the press peppered her with questions. “And I said, ‘Who is Amina Lawal?’” Morley recalls with dull emphasis. “It’s like everything I do is wrong!”

Certainly, it was an early warning. One by one, title-winning beauties, reading about the plight of the Nigerian mother, sent in their regrets: Miss Costa Rica, Miss Switzerland, Miss South Africa, Miss Denmark, Miss Austria, and Miss Panama would not be going to Nigeria.

Amnesty International doesn’t seem in the least surprised to have heard from Miss Scotland about the moral implications of flying to Nigeria. But, as Enrique Restoy, who does research on Nigeria for the organization, tells me, “it’s not our policy to support boycotts. We tell governments what to do, not people.”

And indeed, right from the start, various Nigerian-government ministers, eager for the pageant to promote tourism, made it their business to assuage everyone’s moral objections. No, Amina Lawal would not be stoned, they assured Morley and her charges. No, there would be—no matter what anyone said—no amputations in the Muslim North of the country, even though reports had it that two children were being thus dealt with for stealing a cow. The central government of the Christian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, would never tolerate such outrages. “The federal law takes precedence over ... Muslim law,” said a foreign-ministry official.

And Morley believes these assurances. The spotlight shining on scores of beauties, she says, has done its work. “Amina Lawal was sorted out,” she declares with the briskness of a tidy housekeeper. “And she will never, never be stoned.” Moreover, “there aren’t going to be any amputations.”

But Restoy of Amnesty International isn’t so sure. “Basically you can’t trust what they say in Nigeria,” he tells me. “Because the federal government—they don’t have control over what is done in different states. The states do what they want.” The Nigerian president is in no position to clamp down on the harsher verdicts of Islamic law, Restoy adds, because “the president needs the support of the northern governors and the northern states. He has an election coming up, so he’s not going to do anything to undermine his power. So if the states have the power to implement Sharia law, it will be implemented. There is no doubt about it.”

In the last three years, he continues, there have been four people sentenced to death for adultery in Nigeria, and at least four, one a 16-year-old boy, have already had amputations for theft. And almost certainly these figures are low. Sentences in Muslim courts are often carried out immediately on illiterate defendants who have no attorney.

And the northern Muslim portion of the country is not the only area where such outrages occur. “To give you an idea of how twisted things are, in the southeast of Nigeria there is a group of vigilantes, among the Ibo, called the Bakassi Boys,” says Restoy. “If someone is suspected of a crime, the vigilantes make a cross out of two machetes, placing it in front of the suspect’s face.” If the face reflected turns red, the hapless victim is set on fire and burned to death.

Restoy saw just such an instance on a visit last spring, inside the compound of the governor of the Nigerian state of Anambra. “A man in his 40s was kneeling down, and surrounding him, 10 to 15 boys dressed in black with a lighter,” the official recalls. “And they were pouring gasoline on the man.”

On glimpsing the group from Amnesty, the boys flung the body of their victim into a van and sped away. That was the last Restoy saw of them.

Since 1999, the year Islamic law was introduced in the North, the nation has been in turmoil. Of the country’s 36 states, each of which has considerable autonomy, 12 apply Sharia law. Long before the beauty pageant arrived, thousands were killed in Muslim-Christian fighting and churches were burned. Morley and her girls were almost certain to become pawns in some fashion or other in the interreligious strife that has beset the fledgling democracy. The pageant came under the auspices of, among others, Stella Obasanjo, the jolly wife of the Nigerian president (to whom, Morley tells me, she gave $80,000 for one of her charities).

By Edward Miller/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Weeks before the pageant was due to take place, there had been rumors of impending Islamic protests. So when the girls landed in early November, a red carpet wasn’t the only thing that awaited them. “They get off the plane, these beautiful young girls, all thin, modelly-looking girls, and they were wearing tank tops and low-riding jeans showing belly buttons,” recalls Vanity Fair contributing editor Janine di Giovanni, who has written about Nigeria for the London Times. “They should have shown a little bit of sensitivity.”

Isioma Daniel, writing in Lagos for ThisDay (“arguably the most influential paper in Nigeria,” its editor, Simon Kolawole, informs me), was among those aware of how inflammatory the pageant’s presence might be. “It aroused dissent from many groups of people,” she wrote in her fateful article. “The Muslims thought it was immoral ... to revel in vanity.”

Then she speculated on the prophet Muhammad’s marital choices. As he was thought to have had about a dozen wives during his lifetime—among them a spouse taken by his own adopted son, Zaid, who had divorced her—that wasn’t entirely preposterous. (Daniel’s parents, Christians from Lagos, found the passage, as her mother says, “completely innocent. Muslims are allowed to have several wives.”) It was simply, given the religious passions raging in her country, an unmitigated disaster.

‘That came from not knowing the implications,” explains Ali M. Ali, ThisDay’s associate editor. “When it comes to certain things, like the complexities of Nigeria, given Isioma’s own background, she is a bit inexperienced. People here in Nigeria take religion very seriously.” Daniel had worked on the paper exactly eight months, after passing her A levels and graduating from the University of Central Lancashire in Britain. Her bosses marveled at her talent and ambition.

“From the first day she could speak and say ‘Mummy,’ my daughter wanted to be a journalist. A print journalist,” recalls Ndidi Daniel, a telecommunications businesswoman. “She said, ‘Mummy, I’m a print woman.’”

In vain did the girl’s parents beg their oldest child to choose another career. “In Nigeria, there is nothing like the freedom of speech you have in America,” says Mrs. Daniel. “If you live in a country where the military has ruled so long, where democracy is young, journalism is very dangerous.”

As it happened, the young woman witnessed firsthand the limits of what she was allowed to write, when she interviewed Amina Lawal’s lawyer and learned certain passages were to be stricken from the final version of the article—for fear, evidently, of offending the readership. Mrs. Daniel recalls her daughter bitterly complaining about such self-censorship. “It was ‘Remove this, remove that’—she didn’t like that,” says the mother.

Even worse, in Daniel’s eyes, was the apology issued by her newspaper after her article on the pageant appeared. Apologize for what? wondered the journalist.

She soon found out how necessary protective measures were. “The minute the newspaper hit the stands, the security police came looking for her,” recalls Isioma’s mother. “And in my country that’s bad news. They lock you up—no courts, no bail, no lawyer. And your family doesn’t know where you are. Isioma was tipped off about the security services coming for her from a colleague. Until then she wasn’t prepared to go into hiding. But that’s when my husband said, ‘That’s it! You’re going into hiding. You’re young, no more than a baby yourself.’”

All this horror was very nearly averted. The offending paragraph on Muhammad and his probable selection of a pageant beauty had actually been edited out of the article. “But the problem is by then the article had already gone to the mainframe computer—we don’t have the technical facilities of other cultures,” Ali says mournfully. “And by then it was too late.”

Ali, a Muslim, was sent around the North to do what he calls “damage control,” but it was too late for that as well. Offices rented by ThisDay were burned, but it is still publishing. “My daughter was a pawn,” says Mrs. Daniel. “There were elements just using her article to get at a Christian president.” By the end of the riots, Daniel was under fatwa. “Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed,” declared Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi, Zamfara’s deputy governor.

As it happens, religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria disagreed with that verdict, along with the federal government of Nigeria. But, as Restoy of Amnesty International notes, “although it is totally illegal, it has been issued by the government of a state. I don’t see what the authorities can do about that.... There will be many, many radicals trying to get ahold of her and kill her.”

Restoy has been in contact with the frightened journalist. “The first thing we tell someone who is under fatwa,” he explains, “is to get out of the country.”

Isioma Daniel E-mails me plaintively, every word edged with desperation. “Please write that I am currently in hiding in Europe,” she writes. But she longs to come to the United States to pursue her career.

“Physically, my daughter is in good health,” says Mrs. Daniel. “But emotionally she is not. Not at all. She is crying.”

The calamities are unceasing. Julia Morley rolls her eyes. From the beginning, she says, there were contestants who believed any calumny concerning Nigeria. “There was Belgium going around weeping” over reports of amputations. “Then Canada came in, saying, ‘Omigod, they’re chopping the hands off children.’ Followed hotly by, I think, Northern Ireland and then England.” And Miss Wales as well. “She’s the telegraph pole!” says Morley. “And suddenly it was like a spreading disease!”

So it must have come as no big surprise that when riots began Miss Canada and Miss Scotland were not the only girls anxious to book a plane out. “Then the other U.K. girls wanted to leave as well,” Miss Canada recalls. “And the next thing I knew I was gone,” Miss Canada concludes. “The Miss World Organization—they just sort of wanted to get me out of there.”

Morley was, not for the first time, in a quandary. The Nigerian authorities were begging her to stay. There was $8 million at stake, not to mention the problem of relocating contestants, many of whom had brought along hundreds of pounds of clothing. But even some of the television crew due to fly in were balking at the notion. Ian Stewart, the pageant’s executive producer, discovered that “the girlfriend of one of my crew members had burnt his passport.” A glance at the faces around her told Morley exactly what was written there. They had to get back to London—fast.

At 11 P.M. on Friday, November 22, Morley gathered the remaining contestants around her and said they were leaving. “Everyone cheered,” says Miss Scotland. A jumbo jet was wrangled from Cameroon: that set Morley back $400,000. The vast 19th-century Alexandra Palace in North London was booked for the televised pageant: another $160,000. All in all, the relocation cost Miss World $1.6 million. At three A.M. Sunday, the jumbo lifted off for Britain, and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief. Morley had extricated her girls. Now she has to do the same for herself.

There was good news and bad news after the pageant’s successful conclusion before a crowd of 2,000 almost two weeks later. The good news was that the newly crowned Miss World is Muslim (“A very good political move,” an Iraqi politician recently informed Morley, although the organizer swears religion had nothing to do with the judges’ decision). Also, Miss Canada had returned when the venue changed. And Miss South Africa joined the fold. The bad news was money. Michael Macario, the financial director of Miss World for the last 18 years, doesn’t think Morley will have to sell her $9.6 million house in London’s Dulwich neighborhood. “It isn’t necessary at this moment in time,” he says cautiously. “If it becomes necessary, Julia will be very supportive.”

He was still crunching numbers when we met. Television rights have netted them just $800,000. A few Nigerian governors have honored their debts: $2.5 million more. But most of the promised millions they can kiss good-bye. And in 2001, Macario adds, “we lost around a million pounds.” He does not look happy. “In a good year we would expect to produce a million pounds’ profit,” he says. “We’ve had mixed years.

“But we’re still here.”

Undaunted, Morley has plans. She will never sell Miss World, she insists. Indeed, she is full of energy, envisaging marvels to come. She intends to launch something she calls the World Broadcasting Network. She wants to stretch the Miss World televised spectacle from one night into a full week. She will launch a Miss World cosmetics line. This year contestants will be competing in China!

And the issue of human-rights violations in that country does not daunt her.

“Who am I to judge China?” Morley asks solemnly.

Who indeed? The Olympics are going to be held there in 2008. Even Donald Trump’s Miss Universe girls will be in China in two years’ time. “And they’re paying us $10 million to go there,” Trump adds triumphantly.

I tell him of Morley’s strikingly similar plans for the coming year.

“Oh, really? Hmmmmm,” says Trump, his voice drained of joy. Across the phone lines, I can hear his mind whirring.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/missworld200303