Bosnia is under my skin. It’s the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.

Ashdown frames Bosnia not as a past assignment but as a lasting moral and emotional imprint—“under my skin” suggests an experience that cannot be shrugged off. The “nightmare” evokes the brutality and human cost of the Bosnian war and its aftermath, while “guilt” and “anger” point to a perceived failure of international actors (and perhaps himself) to prevent suffering or deliver justice quickly enough. His claim that the anger has become “something much deeper” implies a transformation from immediate outrage into a sustained ethical commitment: a drive to remember, to repair, and to insist on accountability and political reconstruction rather than treating the conflict as a closed chapter.