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The promoter, clearly sensing trouble, moves over to talk to the safest face among us - Julie Dawson, who manages British DJs for UK production and management company Wise Buddah. The two of them  quickly reach the international language of dance music - hard house, trance, Tong, Rampling and Cox. Then she reveals that she's over here because her company produces Boy George's radio show Clubversive, and the promoter erupts with joy.

"Yes, yes, Clubversive, I hear it on Oxsigen." And then he's clapping us on the back and getting us drinks and asking if Boy George would play his club. I think to myself - if only Captain David Bailey were here. He'd practically be in tears by now. 

Captain Bailey is the man who created Oxsigen for the British army's element of Nato's stabilisation force SFOR. He almost single-handedly built the station's prefab hut studios on the metal factory base. Oxsigen is a dance station, programmed and scheduled just like Kiss, Galaxy or Radio 1, although with curious ad breaks which carry only advice and information on mine clearance and learning to live together again. When Radio 1 says One Love on air, it's a corporate slogan. When Oxsigen's local Serbian, Croat and Bosniac Muslim DJs say it, they mean let's all stop shooting each other.

Bailey has been working on the station for two years - an unusually long period in Bosnia where most soldiers only do a six-month tour - but he clearly loves radio. It was his desperate enthusiasm which got Boy George to play on the station: Bailey contacted Wise Buddah which - with George - was so impressed by the outfit that it basically gave him the show for nothing.

"It sounds a bit naive in the UK to talk about dance music changing things, but there's something about it that really brings people together," says Boy George. "That's why we were so happy to give them the show. The generation in Britain before acid house was uptight, homophobic and unsophisticated. Clubbing was about ultra-hip exclusivity and knowing the right people. Since acid house, kids from Britain are now far more sophisticated. I get no one giving me grief because I'm queer and happy, so that can work out in Bosnia too. We're hoping to do some DJ dates there - I'll be the first western DJ out since the war - and it'd be great if Serbian, Croatian and Muslim kids could all be dancing together in the same nightclub."

Captain Bailey credits George's show with building the station's success. "Out here there's no radio research, so we have to do what the rest of the local stations do - calculate how many listeners we have from the calls, letters and emails we get," he explains. "That method gives us a 19% share and makes us the most popular station in our area, which I think is a bit optimistic. I reckon we've probably got around 16%, and I'm quite happy with that."

It's curious for, well, how many reasons do you want? For a start, this is the British army we're talking about. The unit responsible for creating Bosnia's own Kiss FM is called info ops, or in the American army's terrifying newspeak, psyops - psychological operations. This is the section of the military that spent the second world war dropping leaflets over Germany urging all soldiers to overthrow Hitler and surrender. Given the outstandingly poor results that the leaflets delivered, it's no surprise that the section was pretty hard hit in the army's popularity charts and by the time the Gulf war rolled round it didn't really exist.

The Americans had kept this whole business going, however, and spent much of the cold war broadcasting "join capitalism" messages into places such as Cuba and eastern Europe. Their Gulf war operations had some success and the Brits were impressed. Come the occupation of Bosnia, info ops was back up and running and trying to work out what best to do with its radio frequencies as delivered by the international media commission before Bailey's radio enthusiasm offered an answer.

The French and the Americans were also given frequencies for their stations and the Americans are doing just what you'd expect the Brits to do. Their station is very formal and laced with ads for peace that would make a media novice   cringe. In one advert, a couple are doing a crossword and the bloke's stumped on a clue. "Six letters meaning peace..." he wonders. "Why darling, that's Dayton," she coos. And you can almost hear the militia laying down their arms.

The Brits appear to have embraced clubland for inspiration, using Oxsigen. It has also created a free weekly magazine called Mostovi which is handed out by patrolling soldiers and distributed around shops and town centres.

Mostovi similarly eschews any sort of heavy-handed SFOR propaganda. Instead, it has a diet of celebrity interviews and lifestyle features with news about all areas of Bosnia Herzegovina - as local media in the Republic of Serbska refuse to write about the Bosnian Croat Federation and vice versa. Of course, there's also mine-clearing information and stories about war criminals which jar to my British eyes when placed next to a feature on George Clooney.

"Our job is to support the mission for SFOR," explains Major Nigel Jones, whose job title runs to the delicious SO2 information campaign, HQ multi national division south west. "And that's to maintain a safe and secure environment. To me, that means stopping people going back to war. To do that, we have to try and change the way they see each other and change what they think is an acceptable way to resolve disputes. With the radio, we're targeting the young. We've got multi-ethnic presenters, give unbiased news - including news that is critical of SFOR - and   we work on the premise that if the magazine we produce is boring and worthy then no one's going to read it."

Up in Prijador - the town where ITN filmed those infamous concentration camp-like scenes of starving Croats behind barbed wire - two of the station's 18-year-old listeners chat about its popularity. "I listen because it gets the new music quicker than local stations," says Rada, a Serbian girl. "I listen to it because it is the only station where I can speak my mind," says Alecsandra. "There's almost 300 radio stations out here and all of them are controlled by political factions," she explains. "I call Oxsigen's phone-ins because I've seen and heard things I shouldn't have and I need to tell someone."

And so she tells me. Her dad is Serbian and her mum is Muslim. When   she was 11 years old, the locals burned down her next-door neighbours' house because they were Muslims. She lay awake that night hearing her neighbours' screams as they burned to death, wondering if her mother was next. Now she wants to leave. It all looks grim to her and she's the sort of person the station needs to reassure.

Back in the club, you could believe there is some hope. The squaddies have split and they're all in the middle of the dance floor, hands in the air as the DJ builds a storming set. There are Croats and Serbs and Bosnians here and people may be slagging off SFOR but they're buying the squaddies rounds of Amstel. The guy on the podium with the lurid green glo-sticks steps down and chats to me about music, always music, and doesn't want to know when I get on to politics, so that just for one, naive, 1988 Summer Of Love moment you actually do think that music could make a difference. Or maybe that's just the beer talking.