Published by: World Tibet Network News ISSUE ID: 98/01/01

BEIJING, Dec 31 (Reuters) - China has mounted a massive relief operation in Tibet to cope with record snowfalls that have killed livestock and threatened nomadic herdsmen in the remote region, official media said on Wednesday.

Chinese regional governments had raised some 34 million yuan ($4 million) to send food, clothing and fuel to counties hit by nearly constant snowfall since September, Xinhua news agency reported, quoting a senior Tibet official.

About 50,000 Tibetans were affected by the snowstorms, but no deaths had been recorded, Ciren Sanzhu, vice-chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region's government, told Xinhua.

``So far, there are no reports of people dying from cold or starvation,'' the official China Daily newspaper quoted him as telling a news conference in the Chinese capital.

``The regional government has set up rescue teams in the disaster areas, and damage has been reduced to a minimum,'' he said.

The government had shipped more than 1,700 tonnes of food, 500 tonnes of coal and 40 tonnes of diesel fuel into the disaster area, where temperatures have dipped as low as minus 40 Celsius (minus 40 Fahrenheit), he said.

About 100,000 livestock, or one percent of total herds, in the 40 counties most affected had died, unable to forage in storms which began in September and intensified in December, Ciren said.

Townships and villages suffered blackouts because of the snow, he added.

The hardest-hit area -- Nagqu county, which lies 250 km (150 miles) north of the Tibetan capital Lhasa -- had reported snowfall 40 times since September, in what Ciren said was the worst snowfall since Tibet began keeping records.

The China Daily quoted experts as saying the El Nino effect brought snow months earlier than normal to the region.

The El Nino weather phenomenon, a warming of Pacific Ocean waters every two to seven years that affects global weather patterns, has been blamed for droughts in Southeast Asia and deadly storms in North and South America.

Tibet, a vast and thinly populated Himalayan region of rugged beauty with an average altitude of 4,000 metres (13,000 feet), suffers harsh winters.

China says it has held sovereignty over Tibet, which has a population of about two million, since the 13th century and that it has brought development to a formerly feudal land.

Many Tibetans, devout Buddhists, reject that claim and have periodically protested, sometimes violently, against Beijing's rule since Chinese Communist troops took control in the 1950s.