TOKYO, Oct 3, 2008 (AFP) - Japan said Friday it will send two military officers to Sudan to join UN peacekeepers overseeing a peace deal that ended a two-decade north-south civil war.

Despite the small size of the deployment, the Japanese government sees the move as significant as the Asian economic power is officially pacifist under its post-World War II constitution.

The two officers will head to Khartoum later this month to work at the headquarters of the the UN Mission in Sudan, which groups 10,000 military or civilian personnel from 60 countries including the United States and China.

'We hope that this will not only further strengthen Japan's bilateral relations with Sudan, but also contribute to the region's peace and stability,' Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone told reporters.

Asked if Japan would eventually send troops to take part in actual peacekeeping operations, Nakasone said it was a possibility 'in the distant future' but that the government had made no decision.

Japan currently has 51 personnel overseas in UN peacekeeping operations in the Golan Heights and Nepal. More controversially, Japan until 2006 deployed troops to Iraq as part of the US-led coalition.

Sudan's Arab-dominated government and rebels in the largely Christian and animist south signed a power-sharing deal in 2005 to end Africa's longest civil war, which claimed 1.5 million lives over 21 years.

But a separate conflict erupted in 2003 when ethnic minority rebels took up arms against Sudan's rule in the western Darfur region.

The United Nations says up to 300,000 people have died from the combined effects of war, famine and disease and more than 2.2 million fled their homes in a campaign the United States describes as genocide.