LIVE AID’S GELDOF TO SEEK MONEY FROM THE VATICAN

Live Aid concert organizer Bob Geldof, just back from a 12-day tour of Africa’s famine-stricken nations, says he will ask for financial help from the Vatican at an audience next month with Pope John Paul II.

Geldof, who told reporters here Monday that the $70 million raised from the concert has helped thousands avoid starvation in Africa, visited refugee camps in Africa’s hardest-hit nations to help determine needs and assess the effect of the first assistance raised through Live Aid, the globally televised concert in July that reaped an estimated $70 million in donations.

He said the money has been put to good use to buy a fleet of trucks to transport grain to western Sudan and to support hospitals and water purification efforts.

“We have been able to keep thousands of people alive,” he said after returning from Ethiopia, the last stop of his six-nation tour.

During his tour, Geldof said he saw a riot erupt among the starving when a biscuit fell from a truck in the western Sudan. He said he also saw once-proud nomads of the Sahara who had become “heart-rending” beggars.

“The whole place is in such a disastrous state that really, if we’re to not let Africa slip from the Third World to the Fourth, there must be some sort of plan devised,” he said. “Something must be done mainly by the Africans themselves to sort out a lot of their overwhelming problems.”

During his visit, Geldof talked with officials of Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia and Burkina Fasso and said he didn’t hold back his criticisms of their human rights records.

“It’s too bad if they resent it,” he said of the criticism. “I probably have one shot in my life to say the things I feel to the people that matter, so I’ll seize the opportunity. There’s no point in polite chitchat.”

Geldof, a 32-year-old Irishman, was best known as the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats before he helped organize the Band-Aid fund-raising record last Christmas, then the Live Aid show, seen by more than 1 billion people. He said he plans to go back to singing next year but will still work for Live Aid part time.

“I personally will probably be withdrawing from the front line because Live Aid now has a credibility and it doesn’t need me so much to be . . . the ‘cheerleader’ of the famine,” he said during a television interview. “(But) I will be continuing. How could I stop it?”