Among the hundreds of dead at Lampedusa was an unidentified child. Think about that for a moment.

He or she was, of course, one of the first and most important victims of all of the criminal acts which led to what amounts to mass murder. But we too are victims. Who knows what that child might have grown up to become? Who knows what potentials died with those who went from an unseaworthy boat to their graves?

What doctors, scientists, poets, labour militants, people who might have made us laugh or moved us to tears, who might have cured our illnesses or entertained us or made our lives more comfortable or more secure? Or just been our friends, neighbours, fellow citizens?

The hand-wringing began before most of the bodies were recovered.

European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmstroem promised that she would try to ensure that the European Union's border management agency, Frontex, would step up the number of patrols in the Mediterranean sea.

She insisted that this was in order to avoid further deaths, rather than to achieve the more efficient exclusion of would-be immigrants.

Yet Frontex is headed by a former commander of Finland's militarised border guard and a former senior officer in Spain's militarised police force.

Its real mission is not to save lives but to act as the front line in Fortress Europe. It recently sent a "technical mission" to Libya, which many migrants, despite the obvious and terrible dangers, have to cross to get to Europe.

Libya. Serial human rights abuser, site of civil war, all-round hell-hole and, apparently, suitable partner for the "democratic" European Union.

Once the migrants embark on their journey across the Mediterranean they are in even worse danger, and Frontex has done nothing to reduce this.

Last year the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe issued a list of recommendations.

There should be simple guidelines that it is an international responsibility to launch a search and rescue operation for a boat in distress, failure to recognise which is a criminal offence.

The reasons why ships do not go to boats in distress must be addressed, including the question of compensation. And in accordance with previous rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, people must not be returned to a country where they may be at risk.

What's clearly needed in the face of the immediate emergency is a system of shared responsibility so that European Union member states and others are neither expected to carry the entire burden of unmanaged migration nor permitted to ignore the obligations of international law, treaties which they have freely signed or basic humanity.

Even those sympathetic to the migrants are failing to ask the most important question of all - why do they want to come to Europe in the first place, a continent of high unemployment and rising poverty where far-right parties hostile to foreigners are flourishing?

The answer is of course that bad as things are here they are worse in most of Africa and much of Asia. Again, this begs the question - why?

The true answer is rooted in centuries in which the healthiest young Africans, the people who, like that unidentified child, should have been the future, were kidnapped and enslaved, their lives stolen to feed Europe and north America's insatiable appetite for cotton, sugar and other commodities.

Centuries too in which the wealth of south and central America, Asia and Africa was plundered by Europe and used to finance capitalism's rise to domination, the industrialisation which raised the wealth of Europe beyond that of other continents and the military machines which enabled the system to become self-perpetuating.

Though formal colonialism and formalised slavery may be dead or moribund, both systems survive in renewed forms.

The chain of criminality which ended for the victims of Lampedusa in their watery deaths does not begin with the traffickers. It begins in the political institutions of Brussels and other capitals and the boardrooms of major corporations.

Colonialism has become neocolonialism, while slavery has become clandestine or, more often, has given way to forms of capitalism's "free labour" which are so exploitative as to merit the label "wage slavery."

The European Union's economic partnership agreements require countries in the African, Caribbean and Pacific regions, almost all of them former colonies of present-day EU member states, to offer duty-free access to their markets for 80-90 per cent of EU imports.

Former trade commissioner Peter Mandelson claimed during negotiations that that this would "promote business competitiveness."

What it does in reality is make it impossible for developing countries to create enterprises able to compete internationally.

As economists such as Ha-Joon Chang and Joe Studwell have shown, this has never been achieved other than behind tariff barriers which protect a domestic market in which the seed of a new sector can grow into a sturdy plant.

While the EU demands that its developing country trade "partners" systematically dismantle subsidies as well as tariffs, the common agricultural policy continues to absorb almost Û60 billion (£51bn) a year, the vast bulk of which goes on direct subsidies to farmers.

About 80 per cent of this goes to the owners of the largest 25 per cent of European farms, which generally means to agribusiness corporations.

This clearly enables the production of foodstuffs at prices with which farmers in developing countries cannot compete.

The upshot is that farmers in Africa are losing their land. When they do so, they are forced to go to nearby towns and cities to seek an alternative livelihood.

This, however, is often futile. Failure by foreign investors and aid programmes to promote non-agricultural sectoral development on the basis of the payment of a living wage to workers means that the jobs simply aren't there.

Next stop, therefore, is Europe.

The people who drowned at Lampedusa did not want to come to Europe to see the sights. They were the latest victims of centuries of colonial exploitation, whether in its traditional or "modern" form. Hand-wringing by European Union officials and member state governments who rule on behalf of the corporations which profit from this system cannot disguise their ultimate responsibility for what happened.