By Francois Murphy

PARIS (Reuters) - Libya's foreign minister lambasted his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner on Friday for disparaging remarks about Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, stoking the controversy that has dogged Gaddafi's visit to France.

Kouchner, a former humanitarian campaigner, said earlier this week he was "resigned" to the Libyan leader's week-long trip to Paris and did not meet him at any official engagement.

Libyan Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdel-Rahman Shalgam told a news conference that was in stark contrast to Kouchner's behaviour when he accompanied President Nicolas Sarkozy on a trip to Libya after the release of six foreign medics in July.

"If he doesn't want to see us, we don't want to see him either," Shalgam said, adding that Kouchner's decision to stay away from the Libyan delegation had had no impact on talks.

He said Kouchner was "someone who comes to Libya, who eats with us, who talks to us and who signs (deals) with us, and then when we come to Paris he changes everything, notably the ideas he shared with us in Tripoli".

Gaddafi has spent the past four days in Paris, staying at the French president's guest residence and pitching his Bedouin tent, where he receives guests, in its garden.

On Friday he visited the nearby Palace of Versailles, the home of France's 17th century absolute monarch, Louis XIV.

Gaddafi wandered through the building in a fur-lined trapper's hat and heavy boots, lingering in front of the royal throne. He then went hunting on a former royal estate.

ON THE DEFENSIVE

It is Gaddafi's first visit to France in 34 years, marking a thaw in relations with the West. But the trip has angered opposition leaders, who have accused Sarkozy of sweeping aside concerns over human rights in his eagerness for business deals.

For at least the third time this week, Sarkozy defended his decision to invite Gaddafi on Friday, saying his guest deserved respect for renouncing his weapons of mass destruction programme in 2003 and abandoning support for terrorism.

"I did what I thought I had to do, that's to say avoid at all costs a clash between the Muslim world and the Western world," Sarkozy said after an EU summit in Brussels.

The French president said he raised the issue of human rights with Gaddafi, and his junior minister for rights, who criticised the visit earlier in the week, said Sarkozy had obtained "guarantees" on the issue from the Libyan leader.

Gaddafi criticised France's record on rights earlier this week, saying European countries abused the rights of African immigrants and that if they did not win equal treatment he would help those immigrants return to Africa.

That prompted an angry response from Kouchner, who said Gaddafi's remarks were "rather pitiful".

Shalgam told reporters he was surprised by Kouchner's reaction. "We have seen him on several occasions make statements in the morning and take them back in the evening."

France and other countries were not in a position to criticise Libya for its human rights record, he said.

"Libya is not a country that receives lessons," he said.

"Because human rights in France or in Europe means the marriage of homosexuals and, on the other hand, polygamy is not a human right," he said.

(Additional reporting by Laure Bretton and Crispian Balmer; Editing by Tim Pearce)