Tiarma Siboro, Jakarta – Activists grouped in the Aceh Network for Democracy have demanded an rewrite of the Aceh governance bill, which they say accommodates Jakarta's interests more than those of the Acehnese.

The bill, which will be debated in the House of Representatives this month and is expected to be passed into law by the end of March, will be a likely combination of three legal drafts prepared by the Aceh legislative team, the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government.

During a seminar with House legislators at the Hotel Ibis to discuss the bill, the activists said their version of the draft had been ignored by the government's team.

Contentious issues highlighted in the seminar were political representation, including the possibility of allowing independent candidates to contest local elections, and matters surrounding power sharing between the central government and the Aceh administration.

"Many articles we proposed have been bent to serve the central government's interests," Aceh legislative team member and Syiah Kuala University lecturer Iskandar Gani said.

The Aceh governing bill is likely to be the next hurdle in the peace deal process, after the government and GAM signed a memorandum of understanding GAM in Helsinki last August.

The MOU gives Indonesia until the end of March to pass the bill before Aceh holds its first direct elections.

Iskandar said the draft proposed by the Aceh legislative team described Aceh as a self-governing territory within the unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia.

The activists said they strongly opposed clauses in the bill that could allow the central government to split Aceh into separate provinces. They said the clauses went against the explicit wording of the Helsinki accord, which guaranteed Aceh's territorial integrity. Syiah Kuala school of law dean Scholar Mawardi Ismail charged that the bill "undermines the Aceh administration's authority." "The draft law allows Jakarta to dominate Aceh politics," he said.

National Mandate Party legislator Farhan Hamid, who is Acehnese, said that judging from the complexity of the issue, the House would need longer time to finalize the bill.

"I have counted no less than 500 crucial issues that need to be discussed, and it would be impossible to complete these deliberations within one and a-half months," Farhan said.