TOKYO - Japan plans to send hundreds of military personnel to Sudan next year to join UN peace-keepers overseeing an agreement that ended a 21-year north-south civil war, a report said Monday.

The government plans to send hundreds of army personnel to the UN Mission in Sudan to help build roads, transport goods and personnel by helicopter and provide medical aid, the Yomiuri Shimbun said without citing sources.

Japan now has two military officers dispatched to the headquarters of the UN mission, which groups 10,000 military and civilian personnel from more than 60 countries.

No immediate comment was available from Japan's defence ministry.

Japan's post-war constitution bars its military from fighting overseas, but the country's soldiers have taken part in non-combat operations abroad, including peace-keeping in Cambodia and the Golan Heights.

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.