Jakarta – Indonesian Vice President Yusuf Kalla has dismissed calls by parliamentarians for Aceh rebels to swear an oath of allegiance to the government as a precondition for an amnesty, state media said.

Parliament, still smarting from not having been consulted by the government during the six-month negotiations with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) that led to the historic August 15 peace deal, insists the rebels take the oath.

However, the Antara news agency quoted Kalla as saying Saturday that such an oath was "unimportant".

Kalla, a key player in the Aceh peace efforts, said that any former rebel who breaks the law would be punished like any other citizen, making the swearing of such an oath of allegiance irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Antara also reported that the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM), GAM representatives and the military agreed on Saturday that the rebels would surrender their weapons to the foreign monitors rather than the army.

"The process of the destruction of weapons surrendered by the GAM to the AMM will be very transparent and there should be no worry about any manipulation," AMM Deputy Chief for Security Affairs Jaakkoo Oksanen was quoted as saying.

As part of the peace agreement signed in Helsinki, the government has agreed to gradually withdraw its troops from Aceh in line with the surrender of weapons by the rebels.

The peace deal is aimed at ending 29 years of bloody separatist conflict in Aceh which has already left around 15,000 people dead – mostly civilians.