In early March, the prince submitted his resignation without being asked to do so, and the standing committee met to decide his future. That same day, its members also discussed the problem of the “eastern frontier.” The two documents make interesting reading.52 Khieu Samphan opened the discussion about Sihanouk by saying that the prince had just addressed two letters in French to the “organization.” One proposed that he resign from office for health reasons; the other, addressed to the Cambodian people, dated his resignation from March 20, 1976, the date scheduled for elections to the national deliberative body known as the People’s Representative Assembly.

The prince’s spontaneous gesture, probably aimed at pleasing the Red Khmer, angered their leader, who presumed he was upstaging them. The “Comments from the Organization” that followed Samphan’s remarks offer a rare glimpse of “Brother Pol” with no mandate to be polite. The resignations, Sar said, were meaningless. After all, “Sihanouk isn’t resigning now; he did that already in 1971”—that is, when Ieng Sary had gone to Beijing to supervise the prince. Sar saw two reasons for removing Sihanouk from office. One was ”the class contradiction between him, his wife and the revolution. He can’t live with us.“ The second reason was that the prince’s presence was a continuing embarrassment to the Red Khmer. The party had no need for Sihanouk anymore, Sar said, and the prince himself realized he was ”finished.“ On the other hand, Sar mused, keeping the prince in Phnom Penh could be a way of getting back at the Vietnamese, ”who tell us that we are leftist.“ If Sihanouk departed the country on his own, Sar said, this would ”confuse the Chinese“; but if he stayed, his complaints could be muffled within a month. After all, the prince was a ”patriot,“ Sar maintained, even though his wife was not. Sar proposed that Samphan arrange a meeting with Sihanouk at which he could be praised deceptively and told to withdraw his resignation until it was demanded. It was essential to the party that the prince remain silenced in Phnom Penh.

Two days later, Samphan reported that Sihanouk had “crawled and begged” for permission to resign and had said that his unsolicited letters had not been intended to embarrass the organization. The prince was terrified. Sensing victory, Saloth Sar proposed that Sihanouk not be allowed to leave the country; instead, a meeting of the National Front’s Council of Ministers would ratify his resignation and the prince should be given a tape recorder on which to register statements in support of the regime. Sihanouk was an “old tiger, still frightening to some,” Sar admitted, but because he had joined the revolution, he would not be killed. Sihanouk resigned in April 2, 1976. He spent the next thirty-three months under house arrest on the grounds of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh.53