Last night's TV

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So I'd just about got my head around South Ossetia - well, heard of it for the first time, if that really counts as getting my head round it - when along came Abkhazia. It sounds like somewhere William Boot in Scoop might end up by mistake, or somewhere Harry Potter would go. But this is a real place, and there are all sorts of terrible things going on there - war, ethnic cleansing, all that. It's those Russians and Georgians at it again. Why can't they learn to love each other?

Anyway, luckily there are proper journalists out there, doing proper journalism, telling us what's going on in places like Abkhazia. Aidan Hartley's the man on the ground there, talking his way past checkpoints, asking the right questions. He looks a bit like how I imagine Boot looked - big glasses, a bit unkempt - but I think Aidan knows what he's doing.

He goes and has a chat with the republic's president, Sergei Bagapsh. I like that about places like Abkhazia - that you can just drop in and see the president. (Imagine an Abkhazian journalist dropping in for tea at Downing Street to ask a few tricky questions about Iraq.)

No, they haven't been doing any ethnic cleansing up the Kodori Gorge, Bagapsh tells Aidan. The Georgian residents were given plenty of warning that there was going to be a spot of bother, and are now being encouraged to come back, he says. But Aidan's not just going to take the president's word for it - he's going to go up there and see for himself. And guess what? Mr Bagapsh is talking rubbish. There was no warning, the villagers fled into the woods, terrified for their lives. Now their houses have been ransacked and their pets shot dead.

That doesn't look like the sort of thing you'd do to someone you were trying to encourage to come back. I thought that Mr Bagapsh looked like a nasty piece of work - Sergei "He kills puppies" Bagapsh.

And hats off to Aidan for risking his ass out there.

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