At first it appeared to be just another war of words. Raja Petra Kamarudin waging a one-man verbal vendetta against venal and venereal goings-on in government, and his intended targets simply ignoring his sniping, writing it off as nothing but a volley of cheap shots, or taking cover behind a wall of eloquent silence.

But with a general election looming, and with Raja Petra recruiting more and more vocal supporters through Malaysia Today, he started looking less like a lone gunslinger and increasingly like the leader of a dangerous guerilla uprising.

So the Umno big-shots mounted a counter-attack. First, by hiring a hit-squad of renegade bloggers to monitor and sabotage his malaysia-today.net website and similar rebel sites, then sending a cyber swat-team after Raja Petra himself.

Unhappily for Umno - although much to the relief of the rest of us - these avengers proved unequal to their task. They were led by the terminally-tainted former menteri besar and one-time suspected money smuggler Muhammad Muhammad Taib.

Muhammad was armed only with a police report that turned out to be such a dud that it got the date of the alleged offences wrong - an error that eerily evoked old memories of the public prosecutor needing three chances to choose a time and place at which Anwar Ibrahim might conceivably have committed sodomy as alleged.

It quickly emerged that Raja Petra considered Muhammad such an unworthy opponent as to be almost beneath his contempt. But he let him have it anyway hitting him between the eyes with an article headed 'See you in hell Muhammad son of Muhammad'.

It was a blow-by-blow demolition of Muhammad's moral fitness to attack him; a balls-and-all rebuttal of the charges that he had insulted Islam and the Agong; a roar of outrage, disgust and defiance that demonstrated once and for all - by the fact that Malaysia Today registered a massive five million hits on the day this article appeared - that the word is mightier than the sword and the pen is more powerful than the police report.

But Raja Petra wasn't finished with Umno yet. In fact he had apparently only just begun to fight. He followed up 'See you in hell' with 'A comedy of errors', an article comprising a sardonic and scornful account of his eight-hour interrogation by the police and a discussion of Article 150 of the Federal Constitution.

It held a chilling conclusion: "Round One: Raja Petra. But will I also win Round Two? I don't know yet. We will have to wait and see. Time will of course tell. But what I do know, it is a fight to the death and I really do not care whether that will be me."

Unmo outnumbered

Some readers may have imagined he was somewhat over-dramatising the situation. But of course he was deadly serious. And he's big enough and ugly enough, as my late father would have put it, to know the score.

People who have made a killing out of rigging the balance of power in their favour and ripping the nation off for as long as Umno and their partners in Barisan Nasional have are bound to not only scream blue murder when they're threatened, but also, if necessary, hit back by resorting to the real thing.

I'm sure Raja Petra recalls as vividly as I do the case of Benigno 'Ninoy' Aquino, the youngest person ever elected to the Philippine senate, and an outspoken critic of the notoriously corrupt President Ferdinand Marcos. In 1977 the regime charged him with murder and subversion and sentenced him to death, but later released him into exile in the US.

When he returned from exile on Aug 21, 1983, he was fatally shot in the head - in full view of the television news cameras - as he was escorted off the plane at Manila Airport.

Raja Petra surely also remembers the murder of prominent Indonesian human rights campaigner Munir Talib Sahir, a leading critic of President Soeharto and his Golkar Party, who was poisoned with arsenic on a Garuda Airlines flight to Amsterdam.

But Raja Petra doesn't need such examples to remind him how much danger in which he has put himself. After he was sacked as deputy premier, then arrested and detained, Anwar was savagely beaten by the thug who headed the Royal Malaysia Police at the time. And thousands of lesser lights who have offended Umno have been slapped into the slammer without trial under the Internal Security Act or Emergency Ordinance.

Many other 'problem' individuals have died of unnatural causes in detention, disappeared without trace, or were allegedly shot and blown to smithereens with C4 like the unfortunate Mongolian woman.

But Raja Petra, with all his knowledge, experience and street-smarts must know he's walking into a minefield with his most recent article that I've seen, 'Welcome home Pak Lah', in which he hits out at Umno-connected figures suspected of involvement in the Iraq 'oil for food' scandal and Scomi's exports of nuclear components to Libya. Plus the latest Malaysian connection to appear on US radar, a company involved in the illegal trans-shipment to Iran of parts for F-5 and F-14 fighter jets and Chinook helicopters.

Raja Petra apparently believes that the best form of defence is attack. And he may very well be right.

Even Umno must be dimly aware that the assassination of Aquino precipitated the People Power Revolution that spelled Marcos' political doom. And though their poisoning of Munir didn't immediately bring Soeharto and Golkar down, it certainly helped.

Raja Petra is an Anak Raja Bugis and the nephew of a former Agong to boot. But perhaps his safety is even better assured by the fact that he's also a totally fearless son-of-a-gun, and has a website that attracts hits from millions more Malaysians with their eyes wide open and their wits about them than Umno has the wherewithal to whack.