The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) will send a 52-strong police force to Kyrgyzstan to help restore order in the country's southern regions rocked by bloody ethnic clashes last month.
The decision to deploy a Police Advisory Group was unanimously adopted on Saturday at an informal meeting of OSCE Foreign Ministers in Almaty, Kazakhstan, which is holding rotating presidency in the 56-member organisation.
The largely symbolic international police group will be mainly concerned with monitoring the situation and advising the Kyrgyz police, officials said.
Kyrgyzstan's interim President Roza Otunbayeva on Friday agreed to an international probe into anti-Uzbek riots in the southern regions of Osh and Jalal-Abad in June in which more than 2,000 are feared to have died and thousands were left homeless. The violence broke out two months after Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who had his power base in the south, was overthrown in a popular revolt.
Russia turned down calls from the new Kyrgyz leaders to send peacekeeping troops unilaterally or as part of a mission by the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Moscow-led military bloc of former Soviet states.
OSCE will also work out a package plan aimed at promoting the peace process in Kyrgyzstan.
