Burundi's incoming vice president Alphonse Marie Kadege, chosen for the job by parliament Friday, will play an important role in security matters in a country ravaged by a decade of largely ethnic civil war.

An agreement signed at the end of March between Burundi's main Hutu and Tutsi parties stipulates that the vice president "will countersign all documents related to security," according to a copy of the accord seen by AFP.

"All changes of defence structures as well as their management will be decided jointly" by the next president Domitien Ndayizeye and vice president, who are due to take office on April 30, the accord specifies.

Burundi's civil war has raged since 1993, pitting the small central African country's army, dominated by the members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group, against several rebel groups from the majority Hutu community.

On April 30, incumbent President Pierre Buyoya, a Tutsi, is due to cede power to Ndayizeye, the current vice president, for the second half of a three-year transitional power-sharing period.

Part of the vice president's job will be to reassure Tutsis traumatised by inter-ethnic massacres that have hit both Burundi and neighbouring Rwanda since the country's independence from Belgium in 1962.

"Tutsis are a minority, between 15 and 20 percent of the population. They need a safeguard. Their (security) guarantee is the army," noted an observer of the Burundian crisis, who "If we interfere with the army in too ostentatious a manner," he added, "we will create imbalances, and then..." Civil war erupted when elements in the army assassinated Burundi's first democratically elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, in 1993.

The accord between the Hutu Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU) and the Tutsi Union for National Progress (UPRONA) was also signed by South Africa's Deputy President Jacob Zuma, the main mediator in the Burundian peace process.

It makes provision for equal ethnic representation in Burundi's new army.

"The correction of the imbalance will be carried out gradually and will spread out over a period which will establish conditions for real peace and security," according to the text of the agreement.

The new Tutsi vice president will also "politically support the national army, maintain and, if need be, increase financial resources allocated to the security so long as the war continues," it added.

He will also have the task of "supervising the finalisation of negociations of the ceasefire" with Hutu rebels.

For the main rebel movement, the Forces for Defence of Democracy (FDD), the change of the head of state from a Tutsi to a Hutu is of no consequence.

"We have take up arms to fight against the system, the system remains exactly the same even with Domitien at the helm," FDD spokesman Gelase Daniel Ndabirabe told AFP recently.

The FDD has stepped artillery attacks against several towns, including the capital Bujumbura, during the past week - Sapa-AFP