JAKARTA, May 10, Reuter - Most people in the troubled Indonesian province of Aceh say a 20-year jail term given to a retired policeman turned gun-toting rebel is not enough.

"The talk of the town is that it should have been life, if not death," an intellectual in the capital Banda Aceh with wide contacts across the province said on Friday.

The prosecutor had asked for a life term for Muhammad Saidi, sentenced on Wednesday to 20 years in jail for fighting to split Indonesia's northernmost province from Jakarta's rule.

The former policeman was the first to be sentenced for an active part in the fighting, which initially targeted soldiers, policemen and migrants from Indonesia's main island, Java.

Several other people accused of being the brains behind the Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh) movement have been sentenced to terms of between four and nine years in what defence lawyers approved by the military say are a series of show trials.

Politicians and intellectuals say sentences for the alleged masterminds are far too heavy as there is virtually no evidence that the men, several of them university lecturers or researchers, were directly linked to the 18-month-old armed rebellion.

But the attitude to those involved in the fighting itself, which lawyers and politicians say has killed more than 2,000 people, most of them civilians, is quite different.

"Intellectually, many, many Acehnese people support Aceh Merdeka. But they are tired of the fighting, they are tired of the killing. They can't support the people with the guns who made it happen," the Banda Aceh source said.

The rebels appear to be the product of a marriage between digruntled ex-soldiers fired by the army, commom criminals and members of Aceh Merdeka, a separatist movement which tried to declare independence for the oil-rich province in the 1970s.

Since they began their raids on police and military command posts the army has cracked down hard, flooding the province with special troops, imposing a curfew in several areas and killing people it believes to be involved, local politicians say.

The rebels too do their fair share of killing of civilians, villagers say. "They (the army and the rebels) are all as bad as each other and we wish they would all just leave us in peace," a villager told journalists on a recent visit to the province.

Jakarta says the troubles in Aceh are over and the province is peaceful. The military refused to meet journalists to explain the reason for curfews and high-profile special-forces patrols of highways and villages.