Maskur Abdullah, Medan – Violence flared on the Indonesian island of Sumatra Tuesday, with the military reporting six dead at the hands of separatists while a bloody confrontation also erupted between police and farmers.

A senior army officer in restive Aceh province said the Free Aceh Movement, which wants independence for the region at the northern tip of Sumatra, killed six people.

Colonel Johnny Wahab, military commander for the Liliwangsa command, told Reuters that four people were killed by rebels in the afternoon. Two others were killed in the early hours. The official Antara news agency said four of the dead were civilians and two were police.

No comment from Free Aceh was possible. Aceh's separatist rebels have long waged a low-level guerrilla warfare against Jakarta's rule.

In a separate incident on Sumatra, witnesses said police opened fire on students and farmers protesting about land rights some 30 km south of Medan, the island's biggest city.

Witnesses said police shot and injured at least 20 demonstrators, part of a crowd of about 5,000 people. Local hospitals said no one had been confirmed dead although several of the victims were comatose.

Both in Aceh and in Irian Jaya, at the other end of this vast archipelago, separatists are refusing to take part in the election campaign.

Separatists in Irian Jaya – the western part of New Guinea – say they cannot accept the election and are prepared to die for their cause. "If there's a war with Indonesian soldiers, we are ready to kill," one former war commander with the Free Papua Movement (OPM) told Reuters at a secret location in the isolated Baliem Valley in the vast province's central highlands.