Jakarta – Indonesian rights activists and analysts have criticised a decision to revive a separate army command for Aceh as a misguided attempt to impose a military solution in the troubled province.

The emphasis on force to end the separatist struggle could damage Indonesia's fledgling democracy and the army's own reform drive, they warned.

The government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri is to revive the Aceh military command, that was scrapped in 1985, as part of moves to finally end a long-running rebellion in the resource-rich province on Sumatra island. The Free Aceh Movement (GAM) has been fighting since 1976 for an independent Islamic state and an estimated 10,000 people have been killed – 1,700 of them last year alone. "The conflict in Aceh cannot be settled by forming a military command," said Riefqi Muna, executive director of the Ridep Institute, a rights group.

The government has previously pledged several measures to try to restore peace including the rehabilitation of social and economic infrastructure, faster development, justice for past gross human rights violations, greater autonomy and the restoration of law and order.

"The government has not even touched most of the other measures and instead is jumping straight to the sixth measure on security, with the formation of the military command," said political scientist Kusnanto Anggoro of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He said the revival of the military command for Aceh was tantamount to sanctioning a "permanent military presence." It would allow for further troop deployments in a region which was already "one of the most densely military-populated areas in the world" with some 30,000 security forces for just some five million people.

Anggoro, who also teaches at the military command school in Bandung, said the move also ran counter to the military's own reform program, which includes the gradual disolution of provincial military commands. The command structure has long been blamed for the pervasive military influence at every level of government down to the villages.

Muhammad Taufik Abda, of the Aceh Student Coalition, said that in practice, Aceh has already been under a military command of its own since the launch in April last year of "law and order restoration operations". "They just want a legal justification for their presence," Abda said.

Muna said he suspected the new military command would be funded from some five billion rupiah (481,000 dollars) set aside for the rebuilding of Aceh's social and economic infrastructure.

Separatist sentiment has been strengthened by decades in which most proceeds from natural resources went to Jakarta and by widespread human rights violations by soldiers.

Jakarta has granted the province greater self-rule and a larger share of oil and gas revenues but has firmly ruled out independence.

The US-based Human Rights Watch, in a recent report, said most of the deaths last year were civilians caught in military operations. But it said GAM was "also responsible for serious abuses."