Bhimanto Suwastoyo, Jakarta – Indonesia will miss a deadline Friday to pass a crucial law granting autonomy to Aceh but the province's peace process should remain on track if the two sides maintain open dialogue, analysts said.

The failure will be the first significant hitch in the otherwise smooth implementation of a pact signed with the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM) last August, which provided for a law granting Aceh partial self-rule by March 31.

But analysts said it was more important to properly debate the contentious and wide-ranging bill than to rush its passage, and said its delay should not derail a process aimed at ending nearly 30 years of deadly conflict.

"It is impossible for us to meet the provisional deadline of March 31, as the special parliamentary committee was only set up at the end of last month," said R.K. Ginting, a deputy chairman of the 50-member body scrutinising the law.

"We have not set any new deadline but we hope to complete the process in April if possible," Ginting told AFP, noting that the government only submitted the draft bill to parliament in the first week of February.

Irwandi Yusuf, a GAM liaison officer with the Aceh Monitoring Mission – a team of foreign monitors overseeing the peace process – said that the delay officially constituted a breach of the peace agreement.

"However, we understand the reasons. The government was late in submitting the draft bill. When one starts late, one finishes also later," Yusuf said. He added that the hold-up would prompt commensurate delays in other stages of the peace process, including local elections. He declined further comment.

Rufriadi, a lawyer and activist with the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation in Banda Aceh, said both sides must come up with another timetable quickly and publicise it to prevent distrust of Jakarta flaring in staunchly-Muslim Aceh. "The public in Aceh and in the rest of the country need to know about the new schedule," he said.

He did not see the delay as a serious matter as such an important law "should be comprehensively debated". But he said the law should still be quickly passed so elections can be held before June 15, when the mandate of the monitoring mission expires, so it can mediate any dispute.

Prominent Aceh sociologist Ahmad Humam Hamid also said both sides stood to gain with a more thorough debate on the draft law. "The schedule is a mindset, a set of assumptions, and is not rigid," he said.

Asked how optimistic he was that the debate would be speedy, he pointed to the process so far, which has been labelled as "irreversible" and has seen rebels hand in hundreds of weapons and non-local security forces withdraw. "Experience has shown that sometimes the process can proceed beyond our expectations," Hamid said.

Another deputy chairman of the parliament's special committee, Ferry Mursyidan Baldan, said some 1,446 questions on the law, not yet fully revealed to the public, had already been fielded by members of parliament. "It is so far the highest number of questions (ever) fielded on a political draft law," he said.

He said the length of time needed for the discussion would largely depend on the method of debate to be followed, to be determined in early April. "I am still confident that if we agree on the right mechanism – for example by addressing the questions in clusters and not individually – we will be able to complete the debate in not too long a time," he said.

The law is supposed to see Jakarta make its greatest concessions yet to preserve peace in Aceh, which was hammered by the 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami. Some 168,000 Acehnese died in the disaster but it spurred on peace negotiations as both sides reassessed their priorities in its aftermath.

In signing the pact, GAM agreed to drop its demand for independence in return for, among other concessions, the right to form local political parties, which are banned elsewhere in Indonesia to discourage separatism.

Opposition has been fierce among lawmakers from nationalists, who say that Jakarta may have gone too far in its compromises, but they have insufficient numbers in parliament to block the bill.