By Tiemoko Diallo

BAMAKO, June 8 (Reuters) - Helping development in Africa is key to curbing a tradition of emigration from the world's poorest continent, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said during his first official visit to Africa.

Speaking in Mali's capital Bamako, the former aid worker said in some rural communities sending people to work in France in the hope they would repatriate money had become a custom which needed to be overturned.

"Immigrants do not come to us for their own pleasure. It is a tradition ... a tradition which together we have to get away from, to soften," he said at a reception late on Thursday.

"Co-development ... is a very efficient way of dealing with this problem. This is the direction we need to go in," he said.

In many parts of West Africa, migration to Europe by any means is viewed as a coveted mark of social prestige. More than 30,000 West Africans came ashore in Spain's Canary Islands alone last year after perilous voyages in open fishing boats.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Mali and other African countries live in France, many of them illegally.

Nicolas Sarkozy's election as French president last month stirred fears in Africa that his tough immigration policies could poison France's traditionally strong ties with the region.

Jeered as racist during a visit to Mali last May, Sarkozy has insisted he will seek to curb and control the illegal migration of Africans. Many were already angered by his organisation of repatriation flights -- dubbed "Sarkozy's charters" -- during his time as interior minister.

But Sarkozy's choice of Kouchner, a maverick left-winger, has tempered some of those fears.

DARFUR SPILLOVER

One of France's most popular figures, Kouchner co-founded the Nobel Peace Prize-winning charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), a medical aid agency active in some of Africa's most dangerous and inhospitable troublespots.

He has been a leading advocate of "humanitarian intervention" -- the right to get involved in another country's affairs if human rights are being abused.

Kouchner will attend the inauguration ceremony on Friday of Mali's President Amadou Toumani Toure, who won re-election earlier this year, before heading to Chad, where violence in neighbouring Darfur has increasingly spilled over the border.

More than 150,000 Chadians have been displaced as a result of the conflict and humanitarian conditions in Chad's eastern border region are deteriorating, MSF said on Thursday.

It said one child in five was suffering from acute malnutrition and described the mortality rate in April and May as "catastrophic", adding that with aid agencies focusing on Darfuri refugees, the needs of internally displaced Chadians were being overlooked.

Fighting between government-linked militias and rebels in Sudan's western Darfur region is thought to have killed 200,000 people and forced 2 million to flee their homes since 2003.

Kouchner hopes to bring together an "enlarged contact group" of foreign ministers in Paris this month from countries including the United States, Russia and China, as well as African nations to pressure Sudan to accept a hybrid African Union and United Nations peacekeeping force, diplomats say.

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