Armenia’s 1st Minister of Energy to Be a Californian : * Foreign affairs: Sebouh (Steve) Tashjian, a manager at SoCal Edison, will become minister of energy and fuels Sunday.

Yet another Southern Californian has been recruited by the Republic of Armenia as the young country labors to develop a free-market economy.

Sebouh (Steve) Tashjian, 56, manager of cost engineering for Southern California Edison Co., will become Armenia’s first minister of energy and fuels Feb. 9.

And he unabashedly hopes to build business between his ethnic and adopted homes.

“There are a lot of tremendous opportunities for Californian and American companies to exploit in Armenia in the field of energy,” Tashjian said Monday.

There also seem to be a lot of opportunities for Armenian-Americans from Southern California.

President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, elected last September as the Soviet regime failed, first called on Raffi Hovannisian, 32, a Century City attorney of Armenian descent, to become his foreign minister.

Joseph Libaritian, a Boston political science professor originally from Southern California, now serves as a special adviser to Ter-Petrosyan.

And rumors abound that as many as two more ministers and one more adviser may be recruited from the United States, if not Southern California.

Part of the mutual attraction stems from Southern California having the largest Armenian community outside the homeland. An estimated 700,000 to 1 million Armenians live in the United States, most of them in Southern California.

An admiration of U.S. technology, business experience and trade skills is the other side of the bond.

Tashjian, who was born in Jerusalem, believes that he was offered the ministry because the new government wants to bring in a “business and economic dimension that is not well understood in the Soviet system, and also to bring in renewable energy technologies that are not used in the former Soviet Union.”

Tashjian also doesn’t see even four U.S. ministers as overloading the Armenian government.

“There are at least 25 ministers,” Tashjian noted. Tashjian has traveled to Armenia seven times in the past two years. A 21-year veteran at Edison--which has no business dealings in Armenia--Tashjian will take a year’s leave to help the country develop its energy resources and encourage foreign investment.

In the short term, renewable energies such as wind and solar power are most welcome, he says. In the long term, Armenia is considering such ideas as building a pipeline linking it to Iran.

“Larger U.S. gas companies or oil companies may be interested either in a joint venture basis or in some other way to take advantage of that situation,” Tashjian said.