America From Abroad : Distant Relations : Armenians living abroad are generous with money--and advice--for their homeland. And that’s creating some resentment.

Gassia Apkarian pulled the coat tighter around her shoulders as she sat in her icy, cavernous office at the Agriculture Ministry of the former Soviet republic of Armenia.

But the 25-year-old Armenian-American from Orange County did not complain about power cuts, food shortages and a near total lack of fuel. As a representative of the U.S. group Armenian Assembly, she relished her work coordinating emergency relief aid to her newly independent motherland.

But it was also clear that for her, Armenia was still not quite home--any more than it is for most of the surprisingly few Diaspora Armenians who have come to help build a new, independent nation here.

“I have come to take part in history. This is a pivotal moment. But most of us have not moved here permanently,” said Apkarian, who estimated the number of Armenian-Americans here at only about 100.

It’s ironic that the highly patriotic Diaspora has not had a greater role to play one year after the fulfillment of a century-old nationalist dream of establishing a truly independent Armenia. There are more people in the Diaspora than the 3.3 million people in Armenia itself, including 700,000 in the United States--more than half of those in California.

The Diaspora has been generous. Lobbyists have fought for and won pro-Armenian U.S. government policies and aid. Tens of millions of dollars of Diaspora funds have helped set up clinics, schools and even an American University of Armenia, now working with 200 students.

But “the money rarely comes without strings attached,” said one European diplomat in Yerevan, the Armenian capital.

Foreign diplomats, Armenian officials and some of the new arrivals themselves speak of growing friction between “real” Armenians and elements in the Diaspora over aid, investment and even government policies.

One divisive issue, for example, is the 4-year-old conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan once populated by 150,000 Armenians and 30,000 Azerbaijanis. Diaspora funds play a key role in sustaining both the fighters and the enclave’s self-declared “independent” government, run by the nationalist Dashnakstutiun party.

The “Dashnaks” are determined to allow no compromise that would return the enclave to Azerbaijani sovereignty--a formula favored by the Armenian government of President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who is desperate to end the Azerbaijani-led and Turkish-supported blockades caused by the Karabakh conflict.

“The Diaspora seems more interested to see Armenia as a victorious state than to see Armenia get through the winter,” said one American aid worker.

This divergence was most underlined by the forced resignation in October of Raffi Hovannisian, the 32-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who had been Armenia’s globe-trotting foreign minister and outspoken advocate for a year.

Hovannisian had made a speech condemning Turkey at a Council of Europe meeting in Istanbul, undermining the efforts of Ter-Petrosyan to normalize relations with Armenia’s powerful (population: 60 million) neighbor.

“(The Hovannisian resignation) was a symbol of the path we have already chosen,” said Ter-Petrosyan’s spokesman, Reuben Shugarian. “The policy of Armenia is now being made here. There will be emotions stirred. The Diaspora will have to learn to live with that.”

The question of this ancient Christian nation’s relations with Muslim Turkey is a bitter one for the Diaspora, which is mostly composed of descendants of survivors of World War I deportations and massacres of Armenians in eastern Turkey.

Armenian groups say 1.5 million Armenians were killed in what amounted to genocide. Turkey rejects the charge and refuses to apologize, saying as many Turks as Armenians were killed as front lines surged back and forth.

The advisers of Ter-Petrosyan--who was himself born in Syria and is one of the 250,000 Diaspora Armenians who immigrated here in the 1940s and 1950s--say that in order to normalize diplomatic relations with Turkey, the Yerevan government is now ready to gloss over the genocide issue as well as former Armenian territorial claims on eastern Turkey.

This pragmatism is anathema to the Dashnak party, the main opposition to Ter-Petrosyan, which wins 15% to 25% support in Armenian opinion polls.

“(Hovannisian’s) Istanbul speech was expressing our national interest. . . . We find it very strange that he was removed from his post just because the Turkish government did not want him,” said Arvan Vartanian, editor of the Dashnak daily Yergir, Yerevan’s biggest-selling newspaper.

Nobody in Armenia is ready to forget the massacres completely. But the idea of bypassing the issue politically strikes a strong chord among younger people here. “The Diaspora still carries the pain of the genocide; the old scars are still tender. Those who are here take a more constructive line,” said Apkarian.

There is also a belief in Yerevan that the radical politics of Diaspora parties is not reflected in the silent majority of the Diaspora itself.

“They can understand everything in the mind, if not in the heart,” said Vahan Ter Ghevondian, the president’s adviser on the Diaspora. “The genocide cannot be part of state policy. They are difficult historical questions. They are not for policies nowadays.”

Friction also exists because of a clash of cultures and even a slight ethnic difference between “western Armenians” of the Diaspora and the local “eastern Armenians.”

“The Diaspora has a real problem, a yearning for Armenia. But they are terribly embarrassed by the people they find here,” said Virgil Strohmeyer, a professor and Armenian specialist sent by UCLA to teach in Yerevan. “As for the people here, there is still a feeling of courtesy (but) . . . there is a real antagonism, a real anger against them (the Diaspora).”

Diaspora guest workers are often privileged children of two generations of Western education, stepping into top jobs with a sometimes brash can-do attitude and money to buy their way out of petty problems. Local Armenians are far poorer, but with a world-class orchestra, fine scientists and what seems to be a piano in every house, they feel that their achievements should count for more.

“Armenia can be a place or a state of mind,” said Steven Anlian, an Armenian-American working as a housing adviser to the government. “The perception may be that these people don’t like us. But no, it’s not jealousy. It’s the old Soviet system. The Soviet mentality has not left. We have met the enemy and it is we.”

About 3,000 Diaspora Armenians braved the relatively rough conditions in Yerevan to visit from America in 1992, according to the local representative of Levon Travel, a Los Angeles-based tour company that helps run one of the few reliable foreign weekly flights to the country.

But local Armenians feel some of the visitors tend to treat the place as a kind of theme park rather than a struggling country.

“Everyone wants to come here, buy a small house, piece of land. They say, ‘What beautiful nature! What beautiful mountains!’ Then they say, ‘When it’s settled, I’ll come back,’ ” commented the local representative of a major Armenian aid organization.

“I always try to explain that bringing a couple of hundred kilos of powdered milk is all very well,” he said. “But it has just a one-time use, to make a lot of noise. In this way nobody can help the country. We need it but not that much. If you are rich, come here and start a business.”

Former Foreign Minister Hovannisian has said that the key to whether Armenia makes it is how the Diaspora rises to the occasion. But so far the only factory founded with Diaspora money appears to be Chicago businessman Reuben Terzian’s toy factory, Armentoy.

To be fair, unlike in Israel, there has been no call for the Diaspora to return. Neither is there an Armenian constitution, let alone any law on foreign investment or citizenship. There are shortages that don’t seem to respond to money alone--even the U.S. Embassy in Yerevan is sometimes crippled by a lack of fuel and power.

“It’s not a bad place, very much culturally alive. But the troubles and hardships are not immediately surmountable. If you’re used to living in L.A., it’s kind of difficult,” said Charlie Khachadourian, a Hollywood sculptor. “Here, a lot of people’s financial hopes are tied up with the Armenian Diaspora. But they’ll be disappointed.”