Jakarta – Foreign peacekeepers won't be part of any international monitoring of Indonesia's tsunami-devastated Aceh province after a possible peace deal between the government and rebels, Jakarta said on Wednesday.

The European Union said on Tuesday the mediator for ongoing peace talks, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, had raised the possibility of deploying peacekeeping troops in Aceh to manage any deal to end three decades of fighting.

After three rounds of talks in Finland that began in January following the devastation of the Asian tsunami, Indonesia and the separatist Free Aceh Movement said in a statement earlier this month they would welcome involvement from regional organisations such as the European Union (EU) in monitoring a peace agreement.

However, Indonesian Information Minister Sofyan Djalil, a key member of Indonesia's negotiating team, said on Wednesday a foreign peacekeeping troop deployment in Aceh was not an option.

"The general understanding is that if a peace deal is reached, an external monitoring team will become possible but not a foreign peacekeeping force," he told Reuters.

"If there is a deal, it needs to be monitored. The monitors can be civilians or from the military. But remember, the deal has not been reached yet," said Djalil, who is Acehnese.

Any proposal for foreign peacekeepers would be a hard sell to Indonesia's military and some nationalist politicians after such a deployment ended in independence for East Timor in 1999.

Indonesia and Aceh rebels said earlier this month they had made progress on political and economic disputes in the Helsinki talks, with both sides optimistic tough security issues could be overcome at the next round of negotiations in May.

The conflict sparked by separatist demands for independence in the resource and gas-rich Indonesian province on the northern tip of Sumatra island has simmered since 1976, killing at least 12,000 people, many of them civilians.