Leadership Quote by Paddy Ashdown

Bosnia is framed here less as a posting than as a diagnosis: a conflict that migrates from the map into the bloodstream. Ashdown’s “under my skin” does rhetorical double duty. It signals intimacy and irritation, suggesting Bosnia as both moral bond and perpetual abrasion. The line “the place you cannot leave behind” rejects the clean exit politicians usually crave; it’s a rebuke to the careerist habit of treating foreign crises as chapters that close when the cameras move on.

The emotional sequence matters: obsession, nightmare, guilt, anger, then “something much deeper.” Ashdown isn’t only confessing distress; he’s narrating a transformation from reactive outrage to a more durable, harder-to-shake commitment. Guilt sits at the center as subtext. For a Western statesman, Bosnia is inseparable from the failure of Europe and the international community to prevent atrocity in the 1990s, and from the uneasy knowledge that “never again” proved negotiable. His anger isn’t just at perpetrators; it’s also at bureaucratic delay, diplomatic half-measures, and the comforting fictions of neutrality.

Context sharpens the intent. As a senior political figure who later served as High Representative in Bosnia, Ashdown had proximity to the postwar project: rebuilding institutions, policing ethnic partition, trying to make peace feel like more than a pause. The quote positions him as witness and custodian, insisting that the war’s afterlife persists in the administrator’s mind. It’s a claim about responsibility: Bosnia as a moral residue that won’t wash off, and shouldn’t.