During the war, Britain trained and armed the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), a guerrilla force to fight against the Japanese occupation of Malaya.

[11] In response to these murders, the British colonial authorities enacted emergency measures which included outlawing leftist parties and mass arrests of trade union activists and communists.

Due to their location deep within Malaya's jungles, the MNLA often came into contact with the aboriginal Orang Asli, recruiting them as trackers and using their villages as a food source.

Templer oversaw the implementation of the Briggs Plan, the British military strategy to defeat Malaysian guerrillas by forcibly transferring most of Malaysia's rural ethnic Chinese population to a series of newly constructed settlements known as "New Villages".

[16] The Briggs Plan and the New Village internment camps had succeeded in separating the civilian population from the MNLA guerrillas in the jungles and severely damaged their ability to continue fighting.

[citation needed] Defeated in the first Malayan emergency and outwitted in Singapore politics by nationalist politician Lee Kuan Yew, the CPM by the mid-1960s was fragmented.

The MNLA was not able to reform to its former size and the CPM began recruitment of Thai Malays as well as distributing pamphlets preaching the compatibility between Islam and Communism.

In 1989, the CPM came to the negotiating table and reached an agreement with the Malaysian government which would allow CPM/MNLA members to return to Malaysia if they laid down their arms.