EXACTLY TWO WEEKS from now, on April 9, the nation will commemorate the fall of Bataan and public officials led by President Macapagal-Arroyo will deliver speeches extolling the war veterans who fought the Japanese during World War II. Beneath their beautiful words, however, they are stabbing in the back these same war veterans. These aging and sickly veterans will be deprived of their hospital which was constructed and donated to them not by the Philippine government but by the American government. The government will sell the Veterans Memorial Hospital on North Avenue and Mindanao Avenue. A greedy land developer will demolish the hospital and obliterate the golf course and convert them into condominiums and office buildings for maximum profit.
They say another hospital will be built for the veterans away from Metro Manila where land is still cheap. But that means these old soldiers and their families will have to travel far to get hospitalization. With the high cost of transportation, thanks to a permissive administration, that is like making our war heroes go through another Death March.
This is now the policy of the administration: selling huge tracts of public land to greedy and opportunistic land developers eager to turn them into condominiums and shopping malls. Besides the Veterans Memorial Hospital, the administration is planning to sell the New Bilibid Prisons land in Muntinlupa and the National Mental Hospital and Welfareville compounds in Mandaluyong. Which means that like the war veterans, the relatives of the inmates of these three institutions--assuming new buildings will be constructed away from Metro Manila--will have to travel long distances, and spend scant resources, to visit them.
The government also tried to sell to a mall owner the land on which the Manila Seedling Bank Foundation has an existing lease and on which it is doing a good job of providing the whole nation with seedlings and other plants. The MSBF went to court to stop the sale and won. It was the MSBF that reforested a denuded mountain in Baras, Rizal, with Benguet pines. Now this is a beautiful mountain with a forest of pine trees, like another Baguio (where pine trees, by the way, are fast disappearing).
The government almost sold the Quezon Institute on E. Rodriguez Avenue and Fort Aguinaldo on Edsa, both in Quezon City, until it was told that they cannot be sold because they were donated to the government by private owners who stipulated in their deeds of donation that if the government no longer needs the properties, they would revert back to the donors. The Veterans Hospital was also donated to the Philippine government, so it is possible that it also cannot be sold.
Besides, even assuming that the dwindling number of war veterans no longer need the hospital (though they certainly need it more now that the 30,000 surviving veterans are old and sickly), Quezon City and the rest of the country still need it very badly. The government-owned Quezon City Hospital and the East Avenue Medical Center are having a difficult time coping with the big number of patients seeking medical attention.
The Veterans Hospital was well-planned, well-built and well-located and still has many years of service left. So why sell it just to make a land developer--and the public officials who will get the commission--filthy rich? Why demolish a still serviceable hospital and then build another hospital in another location at more cost to the taxpayers? Because officials of the GMA administration will get fat commissions both ways. It is still a continuation of the NorthRail, the ZTE-NBN and other deals that are making administration officials very rich.
The overall plan is to turn the East and North Triangles, bounded by East Avenue, North Avenue, and Edsa, into QC's business district. That means the squatter colonies that mushroomed around the former Father Aguilar's zoo, and the vacant strip along Edsa owned by Lucio Tan, will be developed. They will surely try to get again the gardens of the Seedling Bank. And the Ninoy Aquino Park and Wildlife reserve would be in danger. I am sure land developers have their covetous eyes on them.
To top it all, the Veterans Hospital is not within the North Triangle. It is beside and outside it. It is just due to plain covetousness that it is included in the development plan.
These tracts of land are among the last open spaces in Quezon City which, for its size, has pitifully few small parks. The North, South, East and West Triangles were set aside as the Central Park of the capital city but they were sold and alienated by the government. The West and South Triangles became residential enclaves as well as the sites of ABS-CBN and GMA studios and office buildings, restaurants and supermarkets. The North and East Triangles are all that are left of the original Central Park. Instead of being an open park, the lung of the city, they will now be converted into a concrete jungle.
The attraction of Quezon City was that it used to have plenty of open spaces. There was plenty of room to breathe and not feel cramped and hemmed in. Not anymore. What is not occupied by squatter colonies are fast being covered with concrete buildings. The Quezon Circle, the city's main park, is a mere mini-park and it, too, is being covered with construction, container vans and a flea market. The day is not far off when QC, too, will become another concrete jungle.
