New York,: After months of dithering and under intense international pressure, Sudan has agreed to the deployment of the first group of the United Nations police advisers and military officers in the restive region of Darfur.

The United Nations said the deployment would be made over the next few days following three-way agreement among the world body, the Sudanese government and African Union (AU) which already has 7,000 ill equipped troops on the ground to monitor the situation.

This initial package is the first part of a three-phase process that is expected to culminate in a hybrid UN-AU peacekeeping force made up of 17,000 troops and 3,000 police officers.

If implement fully, it would bring some hope to the impoverished people of Darfur who have seen their houses and crops burnt, women raped and men massacred.

Diplomats at the United Nations were cautiously optimistic that the agreement would be implemented in the region where the international community had long debated without taking an effective action whether it was genocide or ethnic cleansing as reports of massacres came in.

It is considered a major failure of the United Nations which had promised after Rwanda genocide that it would not allow such massacres to be repeated.