Released from hospital, hunger striker heads to Iqaluit

SARA MINOGUE

A hunger striker whose dramatic protest in Chesterfield Inlet has received little attention flew to Iqaluit this week, to continue his campaign against the “inhumane” treatment he alleges to have received from the Federation of Nunavut Teachers and the Government of Nunavut.

Shaking off false accusations of sexual abuse have proved impossible for Frances Mazhero, who was fired from Victor Sammurtok School in Chesterfield Inlet after just one year on the job, when a Grade 9 student accused him of inappropriate touching.

The accusations were later retracted, and the principal who initially upheld the false allegations was fired, then rehired at another Nunavut school.

But the story continues for Mazhero, who launched a volley of lawsuits starting with the Government of Nunavut and the Federation of Nunavut Teachers and reaching all the way to individual GN workers and even an arbitrator who selected to help resolve the case.

Three lawsuits remain in limbo – suspended until Mazhero posts security for court costs, as ordered by a Nunavut court judge selected to wade through a mountain of paperwork from him.

Mazhero is now pinning his hopes on an arbitration hearing for his defamation grievance with the teachers union. That hearing was delayed when Mazhero rejected his appointed lawyer, and demanded the union pay for a new lawyer.

The union agreed to that demand, and, according to a judges ruling offered $25,000 for Mazhero to hire a lawyer of his choice, if he agreed to stop his court actions. Mazhero rejected that offer, and now denies the offer was ever made, and accuses the lawyer who conveyed the offer of fraud and corruption.

“I want a meeting, where we should set a date for arbitration, period,” he said. He also suggested a former judge should preside over the proceedings – ideally, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia.

At this point, Mazhero said he will represent himself, “if I make it.”

On Tuesday, Mazhero flew to Rankin Inlet to prepare for a trip to the capital, despite his weak physical state.

He spent Monday to Friday last week in a hospital in Churchill, where doctors did all they could to help the emaciated man take fluids, which he can no longer consume on his own.

For the first month of his hunger strike, Mazhero drank only water and orange juice. Since then, he has consumed only water and gastrolyte, an anti-diarrhea drug.

Mazhero told this newspaper he would be heading to the Oqota men’s shelter for a bed

upon arrival on Wednesday (also Nunatsiaq News deadline.) If no space was available, he said, he would camp outside the GN’s justice department offices.

Mazhero is prepared to fight for his lonely cause to the bitter end.

“I will not leave Iqaluit unless my health gives up, or they meet my demands.”

Mazhero makes frequent reference to 10 Northern Irish hunger strikers who starved themselves to death in a British prison in 1981. The prisoners were members of the Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army who demanded to be treated as political prisoners.

Before and after photographs of each prisoner are included in a 57-page coil-bound pack of documents Mazhero sent to Education Minister Ed Picco and the president of the Federation of Nunavut Teachers, Jimmy Jacquard, on March 21.