Jakarta – The first weapon-free zone will open in Indonesia's Aceh province this week to help cement a peace deal that both sides have violated less than two months after signing it, mediators said on Sunday.
The peace zones would help keep the truce between the government and rebels of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) intact and were a step toward eventual demilitarisation, they said.
"The peace zones are meant to be weapon-free areas ... neither GAM nor the military are allowed to carry weapons there," said Steve Daly, a spokesman for the Henry Dunant Centre that brokered the agreement signed on December 9.
The first peace zone will lie south of the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, some 1,700 km northwest of Jakarta. Daly said the aim was to establish a total of eight peace zones in the next two weeks.
A joint monitoring committee said in a statement on Friday that GAM committed two "very serious" violations of the pact in mid-January, in which one Indonesian soldier was killed and two were injured.
The statement said the military had commited a "minor" violation in mid-January in which a GAM member was intimidated.
"This is the first time that either GAM or Indonesia has ever publicly admitted any wrongdoing by any of their people," Daly told Reuters. "They recognise that they need to discipline their people so at this point we will see what happens," he added.
Aceh is one of several flashpoints where separatist, communal or religious violence threatens to undermine the government's efforts to maintain stability in the world's fourth most populous country and bring investors back.
Among other complaints, the separatists say Jakarta has siphoned off too large a share of the income from Aceh's energy and other resources. The government has moved toward satisfying such concerns but says it would never allow full independence for the province in the northern tip of Sumatra island.
In the two years leading up to the pact, an estimated 4,000 people – civilians, government troops and rebels, were killed in the conflict.