VISA REGIMES AND REGULATORY DOCUMENTS AS AN OBSTACLE FOR TOURISM DEVELOPMENT IN CENTRAL ASIA - Tourism in Central Asia: Cultural Potential and Challenges - page 256

(Lonely Planet Thorn Tree, Travel Buddy, Trip Advisor, etc.). Uzbek po-
lice have issued an unofficial directive not to bother foreign tourists with
valid visas. This has now gone so far that the majority of tourists leaving
Uzbekistan do not have their registration checked at all. Of course the pos-
sibility that tourists may be bothered by local authorities is not completely
ruled out, but the likelihood of it is getting smaller and smaller. This gives
tourists from countries outside the CIS significant advantages over the lo-
cals, whose everyday reality is interwoven with encounters with corrupt
local authorities.
In this, however, the rule involving the degree of hardness of the re-
gime does not always apply. To the contrary: direct encounters with un-
pleasant police officers are much less likely in Turkmenistan. There are
fewer tourists, who are thus more easily guarded by the secret police. In
softer regimes like Kyrgyzstan's and Tajikistan's, by contrast, police ex-
ceed their powers more often. Weak working morale and the impossibility
of calling on one's own embassy in traveling for illegal or semilegal work
leads to much more widespread corruption in practice in border areas and
at transport posts (Tajikistan: what about tourism? 2007). For the locals,
border crossing represents a special issue, especially in places where two
countries with poor mutual relationships are concerned (e.g., Turkmeni-
stan/Uzbekistan, Tajikistan/Turkmenistan and others.) The isolated nature
of individual countries and national/nationalistic propaganda lead to isola-
tion between locals who until recent times had lived together in one vil-
lage (Reeves, 2010). A feeling of alienation leads to several reactions on
both sides of the border: closed borders and complicated crossings, and
ever stronger feelings of alienation and nostalgia for the Soviet Union,
resulting in reinforcement of the influence of those groups declaring for
the elimination of these barriers. These include radical Islamic groups like
Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Liberation Party) (Starr, 2011).
CONCLUSION
20 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the approach taken by
Central Asian states the visa policy and other tourist documentation is as
diverse as their political, economic and social development has been. The
more open the economy (and, to some extent, the political system), the
more open the country is about visas and other tourist documents. In the