PEUREULAK, Indonesia, April 28, Reuter - Soldiers and rebels in Indonesia's Aceh province continue to kill civilians and each other and many locals fear refugees sent back by Malaysia could be the next casualties.

"The government says they will be safe, but the government also says there is no trouble in Aceh. Who believes the government? They (the refugees) are finished," said a rickshaw driver at the heart of the trouble zone.

Malaysia plans to send back more than 100 Acehnese who arrived there by boat in the last month saying they were fleeing fighting in their province at the northern tip of Sumatra.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas said it was not clear why the refugees were so frightened but that they would not be harmed when they returned.

"There should be no grounds for these particular people to fear... Are (the refugees) fleeing from the government or people making trouble?" he said to journalists late on Saturday.

Jakarta had earlier said the refugees were just looking for well-paying jobs on Malaysia's labour-hungry plantations.

A foreign ministry official acknowledged their safety would be hard to monitor if they went back to their villages in Aceh. "We have no authority over the security forces," the official said.

A human rights lawyer who follows events in Aceh closely said: "There are absolutely no guarantees for their safety if they are sent back to Aceh. We are very worried they will be killed.

"Here people are killed for no reason at all. How much the more so if they have made the government look bad in international spheres."

He and others who keep a careful count of the killings in Aceh say at least 2,100 people, mostly civilians, have died in the 18-month rebellion against Jakarta rule.

Local government officials said the military shoot people they believe to be involved in the separatist rebellion.

"It is hard for them to know just who is involved. But I think they are usually right - let's say 70 per cent of the time," one official said.

Villagers talk in private of midnight killings, rape and above all fear.

They say many of those who fled to Malaysia were driven by the fear they would be next in what they see as indiscriminate killing by soldiers and rebels alike, though they agree Malaysia's high salaries were a magnet.

Several hundred thousand Indonesians work in Malaysia without proper papers and Kuala Lumpur, short of labour, regularly declares amnesties for illegal immigrants.

Acehnese in Peureulak, the jumping off point for many of the refugees, say some were rebels saving their own skins.

Regardless of who the refugees are, some say, the whole issue is being manipulated by separatists from the Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh) group exiled after their independence movement failed in the late 1970s.

"There are people still dreaming of an Aceh Merdeka roaming the world and hoping to get headlines," Alatas said.

In public pronouncements from Jakarta, ministers say the troubles in Aceh are over.

Military spokesmen refused to meet journalists to explain why several areas of north and east Aceh were under curfew or to give the exact strength of the commando forces who patrol streets with semi-automatic weapons.

The rebels have no public face but seem to be a poorly-armed grouping of fewer than 200 ex-soldiers, criminals and genuine separatists who feel the rich province would be better off freed from Jakarta's rule.

Villagers say little about either the rebels or the violence but what they do say is not pretty.

"Imagine, a body chained to a tree, still with jeans on but already rotting and birds picking at it," said one witness, a forestry worker.

"When we went to take it to bury it, within two minutes there was (an army) man with a gun saying, what's your connection with this guy?"