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The agreement stipulates that the current government remain in office until the new transitional government is established, but without "encroaching on the mandate of the new transitional team due to be formed".
The signing of the agreement was witnessed by, among others, Tanzanian President Ali Hassan Mwinyi, who was the official mediator in the Rwandan peace process, in the presence of presidents Melchior Ndadaye of Burundi and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, as well as Organisation of African Unity (OAU) secretary-general Salim Ahmed Salim.
International observers at the ceremony included those from Rwanda's former colonial power Belgium, as well as Britain, France and the United States and other neighbouring countries of the region.
The signing of the Rwandan peace accord brings a formal end to nearly three years of a bitter fratricidal war which started on October 2, 1990 when the RPF, based on the Tutsi caste, invaded Rwanda from Uganda in an attempt to overthrow Habyarimana's Hutu caste regime in Kigali.
The rebels were composed mainly of minority Tutsis who had been living in exile in Uganda since 1959, when they fled strife at home which saw the overthrew of traditional Tutsi rule. They had been serving in the Ugandan army before defecting with their arms to try and regain power at home.
But the invasion failed, and the rebels turned the struggle into a guerrilla war that killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands of others.
The Rwandan government had often accused Ugandan President Museveni's National Resistance Army, which came to power in 1986 after a similar guerrilla war in Uganda, of supporting the Rwandan rebels, but Museveni constantly denied this.
hb/ma AFP AFP SEQN-0272
