The Tigers are dead but the hatred will live on

Rumour has it that the war in paradise is over and the beautiful island of Sri Lanka will return to its former glory.

Its mist-veiled tea plantations and sweeping coastlines will once more be the world's favourite honeymoon destination.

At least that is what the Sri Lankan government says: the vile Tamil Tigers (LTTE) are dead, the army can return home victorious and there will be dancing in the streets. And with the arrival of the new poya moon, peace will reign. In your dreams!

I left my home in Ceylon, as it was called then, in 1964, a girl of 10; the daughter of a brave Sinhalese woman and a handsome Tamil man.

As the boat taking us to our new life pulled away from the shore, my mother wept inconsolably. When she died 35 years later, she was a woman broken by the prejudices of her countrymen.

Sri Lankans' hatred of their own people goes back a long way. In 1958, when I was four, I witnessed the burning of a Tamil man by a group of Sinhalese youths.

In the school I attended I was branded a half-caste; my mother was disowned by her Sinhalese family for bringing disgrace on them by marrying a Tamil. My father's family, equally, loathed his Sinhalese bride.

Whenever I mention my family history to my Sinhalese friends living in Britain they avert their eyes in embarrassment. That was a long time ago, things have changed, they mumble.

They go on to speak of their hurt at the way the British media portray their country. Yet this month alone Amnesty has devoted four pages of its magazine to human rights abuse in Sri Lanka by both the government and the LTTE.

Yesterday, on a showery May morning, the mood among the Sri Lankan Tamils demonstrating in Parliament Square was sombre. A woman held a doll in her arms, screaming. A young girl told me she simply wanted the British Government to keep the humanitarian crisis in the news.

For make no mistake, the war in my homeland is not over, simply entering another phase. The 100,000 dead will multiply in collective memory. Hatred will go underground. People will not forget the injustices of what has been done to ordinary civilians.

Think about it: if your home is burgled, do you not feel violated? Imagine your home destroyed by a self-righteous army, your favourite possessions trampled on. What does such an event do to you? What does such a brutalising experience do for the perpetrators of such a crime?

What will we have at the end of this hollow, bloody victory is a damaged nation. Young refugees look out over barbed-wire fences.

Maybe they will be rehoused, maybe the government will, as promised, begin a peace plan. But who will give back the dead children to their mothers? Memory is an infinite thing here, as vast as the tropical sky. No government can deal with such damage.

There is one small ray of hope. The LTTE has suffered a devastating blow and the time has now come for the government elected by the people of Sri Lanka to be called to account.

It is time for the war crimes of the army to be made public, for truth and reconciliation, for international agencies to be allowed into the country; the nation must find it within itself to unite. For paradise cannot be regained by the sword.

Roma Tearne's third novel, Brixton Beach, is published next month by HarperCollins.