By Quentin Webb
London - Live Aid founder Bob Geldof called President Robert Mugabe a "grotesque tyrant" and lent his backing to a fund to counter human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.
The Irish rock star turned poverty campaigner endorsed the fund at a media briefing on Tuesday evening.
"(British Prime Minister) Tony Blair has said Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. Mugabe is a scar on the face of Africa," Geldof said.
"He's one of the grotesque tyrants of the planet, and the sooner we can get rid of him, the better," he added.
The British-based fund, whose patrons are two of southern Africa's top clergymen, will raise money for human rights-related lawsuits and to campaign for legal reform.
The Zimbabwe Defence and Aid Fund accuses Mugabe of corrupting the legal system. It says the law is routinely used as a tool of repression, with many facing torture, illegal detention and malicious prosecution.
Zimbabwe has faced increasing international isolation since the start of a government-sanctioned land grab that accompanied a general election in 2000.
The country has been suspended from the Commonwealth since Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, won a widely-criticised presidential election in 2002.
Mugabe says criticism is a post-colonial plot to maintain the dominance of the country's mostly white commercial farmers who formed the backbone of a once-thriving agricultural economy that is now collapsing.
In a statement issued by the fund, patron and South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said: "It is a situation where we cannot stand by watching a tragedy unfold without becoming complicit through our apathy."
"In South Africa a similar fund saved many of our people," Tutu said. "Nelson Mandela himself might not have been saved from the gallows without the efforts of the international community and those who selflessly strove to see that justice prevailed."
The fund's second patron is Pius Ncube, Catholic Archbishop of Zimbabwe's second city Bulawayo and a long-standing critic of Zimbabwean government policy.
In February, Prime Minister Blair appointed Geldof to his newly-formed international commission on Africa.
Earlier on Tuesday, Geldof told a gathering of human rights lawyers he hoped the commission could help deliver massive aid flows to Africa and needed to take a wide-ranging approach.
"Will it narrow itself to the very piecemeal solutions that conjured it into being, as opposed to the very totality of fear in the South (hemisphere)?" Geldof said.
"More than likely. But I will fight non-stop to prevent that happening and should I fail I'll leave."