Inside, there are no victims, no killers, and no questions. There are only bright white lights and the click-clack of sewing machines in this new garment factory in war-torn eastern Sri Lanka.

Outside, the land is littered with memories from the island's quarter-century civil war: Five farmers shot dead in March. Fifteen buried in a ditch. A massacre in a nearby mosque.

"I have people who were in border villages and people who were combatants. They basically killed each other," said Theodore Gunasekara, general manager of Brandix's factory in Punani, which lies on an empty stretch of road 13 miles (22 kilometers) northwest of the coastal city of Batticaloa. "There is a lot of bad blood. When you come into Brandix, you leave the past behind."

Hostilities ended in eastern Sri Lanka nearly two years before the war reached its brutal conclusion in May, making the region the front line of Sri Lanka's postwar revival.

There have been signs of progress. Hotels are expanding as Sri Lankans from the south flock to an area they haven't been able to safely visit in nearly three decades. Rice and dairy production are rising. Bridges, built with Saudi, Chinese and Japanese money, are being inaugurated. Locals say they can watch tarmac roads grow by hundreds of yards (meters) a day. At night, the lights of small boats flicker in the dark sea: People are fishing again.

Yet growth has not eased the ethnic tensions that fueled the conflict. Nor has prosperity filtered down to the streets, where Sri Lanka's peace will ultimately be won _ or lost.

Hope that Sri Lanka will enjoy a quick peace dividend has helped send Colombo's main stock index up nearly 50 percent since the end of the war. But peace alone won't guarantee lasting growth, critics say. Also needed: more foreign investment and tourism revenue, companies getting access to larger markets, and the government shifting spending from the military to development and tax cuts.

By these measures, Sri Lanka's prospects look less promising.

Last year, Sri Lanka got $889 million in foreign direct investment. During the first half of this year, it got just $252 million, according to the Board of Investment. Officials say the decline was largely caused by the global financial crisis, which dried up financing for risky markets. They expect investment to rebound in 2010.

But a frustrating tangle of permits and licenses, persistent corruption, and a quiet sense that anti-Western feeling is rising haven't helped either, foreign diplomats and businesspeople say.