The Photograph That Humiliated a President

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 15 January 1998, President Suharto of Indonesia sat at a desk in Jakarta and signed a tougher letter of intent with the International Monetary Fund, a further round of austerity terms demanded in exchange for continued bailout support. Standing over him as he signed, arms folded, was IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus. The photograph, taken from an angle that made Camdessus look like a schoolteacher disapproving of a pupil's work, circulated widely and became, in Indonesia, one of the most symbolically loaded images of the entire crisis, read by many as a moment of national humiliation before a foreign institution. Four months later, after riots in May 1998 left more than a thousand people dead in Jakarta alone and students occupied the parliament building, Suharto resigned, ending thirty two years in power. Camdessus himself later reflected, at his 2000 retirement, that the IMF had created the conditions that obliged Suharto to leave his job, a striking admission of how directly the crisis and its foreign-imposed terms were entangled with the fall of one of the era's longest-ruling governments.