(Recasts, adds Ivory Coast comments)

By Tiemoko Diallo

BAMAKO, June 8 (Reuters) - French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, on his first visit to Africa, called on Friday for more development aid to help curb emigration and threw his support behind a peace process in war-divided Ivory Coast.

Speaking in Mali's capital Bamako on the first leg of his tour, the former aid worker said that sending people to work in France in the hope they would repatriate money had become a custom in some rural communities 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

Kouchner, the co-founder of Nobel Peace Prize-winning charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), was in Mali for the inauguration on Friday of President Amadou Toumani Toure, who won re-election earlier this year.

He held talks with Ivory Coast Prime Minister Guillaume Soro, the head of the New Forces rebels which seized the north of the former French colony during a brief 2002-2003 civil war. Soro signed a peace deal with Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo in the Burkina capital Ouagadougou earlier this year.

"Minister Kouchner expressed the complete and utter support of France in the process of ending this crisis," Soro told French state radio RFI, adding that the French minister would travel to Ivory Coast soon.

Relations between France and Ivory Coast have been tense since the Ivorian airforce killed nine French soldiers in November 2004, triggering military reprisals by a French force sent to keep apart the warring factions. Anti-French rioting then gripped the economic capital Abidjan.

Kouchner, a leading advocate of "humanitarian intervention", will visit eastern Chad on Saturday, where violence from 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.

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