When Levon Ter-Petrosyan publically announced information on Election Day, February 19th, regarding the court decision allowing for the wiretapping of Alexandre Arzumanian, Chief of his Central Campaign Headquarters, many compared this sensational news with the Watergate scandal.

The inattentiveness with which Gorik Hakobyan, the Head of the National Security Service of Armenia, greeted this expose by the opposition, however, cannot be compared to the subsequent developments of Watergate. It is not comparable for the simple fact that what followed in the wake of Watergate wasn’t the prohibition of statements of a given official in the name of internal stability and civil disobedience, but much more serious developments.

Let’s note a few facts to underscore the difference. The five spies who had infiltrated the Democratic Party Headquarters were exposed and by January 1973, two months after the ‘convincing’ win of Richard Nixon, legal proceedings against them had gotten underway. By March, a Watergate Investigative Committee in the Senate began hearings on the matter and these public sessions were broadcast into American homes. Some 85% of all Americans followed these hearings intently.

In August of 1973 President Nixon refused to make statements regarding the secret wiretaps to the Committee nor to provide transcripts of tapes made in the Oval Office of conversations he had with his staff on the matter, something that a number of officials had proven to be the case. Moreover, in a manner befitting the authorities in Amenia, Nixon attempted to arrange for U.S.Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox to be fired for demanding such information from the Nixon Oval Office.

What is even more unbelievable for us is that Richardson refused to carry out the order of the President, something that Gorik Hakobyan would have described as a “manifestation of disobedience”. In October Richardson along with his assistant handed in their resignations. Parenthetically, we should note that neither Richardson nor his assistant were assaulted at the Argavand intersection by forces of the 6th Department, they weren’t arrested nor beaten.

In February of 1974 the U.S. House of Representatives commenced impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. Nevertheless, Nixon resisted and refused to hand over wiretap transcripts to the investigative bodies, citing executive privilege. However, in July 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided that the president had no such immunity and ordered that the tapes be handed over.
On August 9, 1974, President Nixon resigned from office. Several days earlier, on August 5th, when the official findings were to be transferred to the U.S. Senate, the conversations recorded  on June 23, 1972 were decoded according to a decision of the Supreme Court. In those conversations Nixon and his Chief of Staff John Haldiman discuss the Watergate affair, labeling it ass the “smoking gun”. They discuss how the investigations might be impeded with the complicity of the CIA and FBI.

Even these facts came to light, even the most ardent Nixon supporters began to suspect that Nixon, due to personal and party interests, attempted to impede the course of justice from the very beginning. Even Republican Senators, who were preparing to vote in favor of Nixon, came out in public support of the guilty charges after studying the tapes.

No one, even in their wildest dreams, could imagine that something similar can happen in Armenia. That the Prosecutor’s Office can actually discharge its duties, that the judicial system can do the same or that Deputies to the National Assembly, independent of their party affiliations, can act as citizens and individuals. On the other hand, even an American imbued with the greatest of imaginations, couldn’t have pictured that such officials, rather than writing out their resignations, could have made the transcripts of the illegal wiretaps public property by publishing them in pro-government newspapers.

The objective for reflecting upon the 36 year-old Watergate affair isn’t merely to diagnose the illness afflicting the present Armenian regime but to prove, once again, that Alexandre Arzumanian and the other jailed oppositionists are being subjected to political persecution.