Jakarta – Indonesia has suspended a joint committee with Acehnese rebels that was monitoring security in the province where about 1,000 people are believed to have died this year, reports said Friday.

The suspension was slammed by the Free Aceh (GAM) rebels as one-sided and callous and followed the resumption of talks between Jakarta and GAM in Switzerland last weekend.

Jakarta's chief negotiator at the talks, Hassan Wirayuda, said the move followed GAM's refusal to present their top commander at the negotiating table. "We urged GAM to include [commander] Abdullah Syafi'i as a display of their good faith in upholding the present security arrangements," Wirayuda told the Jakarta Post.

"So far, they have been unable to meet the demand, citing political reasons." GAM has ruled out bringing Syafi'i to the talks as long as the violence continues. "Now is not the right time to bring Syafi'i to the table because violence is still raging in Aceh and there is still no ceasefire," Sofyan Ibrahim, a GAM representative at the Geneva talks, told AFP by phone from Singapore en route to Aceh.

The two sides met in Geneva on July 1 to resume peace talks which were suspended late last year after a series of failed truces. Wirayuda said GAM also refused to guarantee security for the US oil giant ExxonMobil, which shut down its Aceh plant on March 9 amid repeated security threats, including arson and kidnappings, which it blamed on the rebels.

"We demanded that GAM publicly announce that they would guarantee the security of ExxonMobil Oil Indonesia, but they could not see their way to meeting this request either," the Post quoted Wirayuda as saying.

"So we decided to put the joint committee on security modalities on ice for a while." Jakarta is desperate for ExxonMobil to reopen its plant, the closure of which is estimated to be costing it 100 million dollars a month in lost liquefied natural gas exports.

GAM's Ibrahim however said the closure had "nothing to do with GAM," and that the rebels would only guarantee security if the heavy contingent of soldiers were withdrawn from around ExxonMobil's facilities. "GAM objects to the massive presence of TNI [Indonesian military] there," Ibrahim said.

Ibrahim said GAM had demanded at the talks that Jakarta cancel a security operation in Aceh which was authorised by President Abdurrahman Wahid in April, withdraw all non-local soldiers and police, continue dialogue and efforts to reduce violence, and expel all Acehnese informants. But the Indonesian officials rejected the demands and suspended the security monitoring committee instead, Ibrahim said.

A statement from GAM's exiled leadership, based in Sweden, said the committee's suspension reeked of indifference to the Acehnese people's suffering. The decision "could be interpreted as a lack of concern for the safety of the people of Aceh, in a situation of intensifying military operations," GAM's European spokesman, Bakhtiar Abdullah, said in the statement, obtained by AFP.

Abdullah said GAM had in fact proposed enhancing and expanding the security committee and a second body to monitor humanitarian affairs, but Indonesia had rejected the proposal. Both committees were established with the joint signing of a "humanitarian pause" truce agreement in Geneva in May 2000. Abdullah said the committees' effectiveness had been "severely cramped by the authorities' refusal to allow free travel," or to grant them safe passage passes.

Aceh, a devoutly Muslim and resource-rich region on the northern tip of Sumatra island, has been rocked by violence between security forces and GAM, who have fought for an independent Muslim sultanate there since 1970s.

The military and residents said Friday that eight more people, including four suspected rebels, had been killed in the latest violence. Unofficial estimates put the number of people killed in Aceh so far this year at almost 1,000, of whom 75 percent are civilians.