My wife was born and LIVED in Abkhazia in the early 1990's. She was 14 years old on the day when the Georgian army rolled across the Inguri River and into her town of Ochamchira.

Not long after they occupied the town, the Georgians began driving out my wife's Abkhaz neighbors, pillaging their homes, and sometimes burning them. It didn't stop there. After a while, those who didn't leave began turning up dead. One day, a middle-aged man who lived nearby was pulled aside by Georgian soldiers while bicycling past my wife's home; after examining his papers and determining that his surname was Abkhaz, the soldiers summarily shot him dead and left the body on the street to be collected by relatives.

My wife is not Abkhaz, which is probably part of the reason why she and her family survived the war - barely. When all is said and done, she witnessed shrapnel flying through her bedroom window, repeated nighttime bombings during which she and her sister and parents were forced to hide for safety in their outhouse, and the near-murder of her father by a pair of drunken Georgian soldiers who tried to steal his coat.

Was there retaliatory ethnic cleansing by the Abkhaz after things turned around and their forces arrived back on the scene to drive out the Georgians? Yes, absolutely - but the point remains that atrocities were committed by BOTH sides. The point ALSO remains that, just as was the case this past week in South Ossetia, one side chose to escalate hostilities to the level of open warfare FIRST - and that side was the Georgian.

My wife has vowed that neither she nor her parents will ever live under Georgian rule again. Given past memories, I can't say I blame her. These past few weeks, she's been visiting Ochamchira with our two young children, ages 4 and 2, to see her parents and introduce our young son to them for the first time in what was supposed to be a joyful family reunion. I shudder to think how things might have turned out if Mr. Saakashvili had opted to begin shelling Ochamchira without warning at 1 AM in the morning a week ago, rather than the city of Tskhinvali several hundred miles away. Again, it's by no means a hypothetical scenario - as I pointed out, they did so 16 years ago, when my wife was a girl, and they've certainly never given up hopes of regaining Abkhazia.

The video is amusing on a certain level, but the commentator, like almost all Americans I've met, strikes me as uninformed - a serious charge, I think, when the issue is as weighty a one as this. Thousands of people have paid with their lives in these conflicts - for their sakes, and more importantly, the sake of succeeding generations who need and deserve to live in peace, it really IS important to make an extra effort to get the essential facts straight.

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