The Bane of Privatization and Liberalization NABIL SULTAN 'Globalization insights’ is a series of feature stories told by journalists from Africa, Asia and Latin America – sto­ries that give an insight into the perceptions and experi­ences of people as globalization unfolds in their environs. This project is jointly organized by the Friedrich-Ebert­Stiftung and IPS EUROPA. Majed Hajori, a 32-year-old'computer typist', was very happy to get a job in a public corporation. But Majed's happiness did not last very long. He lost his job after the government liquidated the Yemeni Industrial Bank and offered it for privatization. With Yemen, like other developing countries, being pres­sured to follow the global economic models – imposed by donor organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – privatization is becoming a real nightmare for thousands of low-qualified people wor­king in public institutions. There is a history to it: The Republic of Yemen was constituted in May 1990 with the unification of North Ye­men and South Yemen. But soon after the Gulf crisis erupted, resulting in severe reductions in aid from neigh­bours, particularly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well as from western donors, including the United States. The Gulf crisis in 1991 and the Yemeni civil war in 1994 were accompanied by government mismanagement. This in turn sharply worsened Yemen's economic predicament forcing the government to turn abroad for external as­sistance. Between 1995 and 1999, 40 percent of small and medi­um-sized public enterprises – including Aden Textile Factory, the National Bank of Yemen and Grains Corpo­ration – were privatized as a pre-requisite to obtaining loans from IMF and the World Bank. The Social Development Fund administered by the World Bank did carry out several projects which absorbed a lot of the national workforce. But these did not have a sustainable impact on the country's employment situation. Then came 9/11 attacks on the United States. In Yemen, as in several other countries all over the world, the go­vernment began focussing on national security and figh­ting terrorism. As a result, the second stage of privatizati­on involving Electricity, Yemenia Airlines Company and Aden Refinery was postponed. For Ali Ghamdan and Abdul Basit al-Noami, both public sector employees, and for thousands others who were on the brink of being rendered jobless, 9/11 attacks that killed thousands of innocent people proved to be"a real