CHINUA Achebe, Madeleine Albright, Luis Bunuel, Albert Einstein, Victor Hugo, Thabo Mbeki, Miriam Makeba, Rudolf Nureyev – these are just some of those listed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as displaced persons who have “made a difference” to the world.

We will never know what Aylan Kurdi would have become. The three-year- old might one day have been ranked among those writers, artists, presidents, and composers. Perhaps more likely, such is the rare instance of genius in the world, he would have been just another ordinary boy, one of those everyday miracles, someone who would grow up to be not a hero or a high achiever, but a human being doing the best he could.

Instead, his family having fled Syria in search of sanctuary, Aylan became that dreadful thing, a symbol. His body washed up on a beach in Turkey, his five-year-old brother only yards away, Aylan was yet another emblem of man’s inhumanity to man. Those countless mourning thousands that Burns wrote about reached the millions as images of the “boy on the beach” pin-balled around the internet. Surely this would be a turning point in the migrant crisis that Europe has managed to turn into a disaster?

The deaths of the Kurdi brothers and at least 10 others, including their mother, are remarkable not just for their horrifying nature, but also for the fact that they are the first that millions have witnessed. Given more than 2,600 souls have perished in the Mediterranean so far this year, there are many more Aylans and Galips who have passed through this world unseen, their identities only known to the grieving relatives left behind. But what has been glimpsed is now impossible to forget. That, at least, is the way of it for most of us. Whether it is the case for political leaders is something else. It is hardly reassuring to hear that an emergency meeting of EU ministers is to take place on September 14. What a strange definition of emergency: Dial 999 and your call will be answered 11 days later.

The blame game has already started. In Brussels yesterday, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, said the thousands who had arrived at the main railway station in Budapest were Germany’s problem. Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are similarly opposed to taking in many of the tired and huddled masses coming their way. In the UK, David Cameron argued that the answer to the crisis was not simply “taking more and more refugees”. In Germany, set to welcome 800,000 this year, pressure is growing on the government to make the rest of the EU accept its fair share, and apply the asylum rules properly, or face the consequences in the form of funding cuts and loss of voting rights.

If EU members were unable to agree on trade rules, banking regulations, or the definition of a widget, one would generously call the behaviour of some members a muddle. But with lives having been lost, and more on the line, this inability or unwillingness to tackle the crisis begins to look like criminal negligence. A united approach must be found, starting with some basics, such as accepting the difference between migrants and refugees. The UNHCR is clear: “Migrants, especially economic migrants, choose to move in order to improve the future prospects of themselves and their families. Refugees have to move if they are to save their lives or preserve their freedom.”

Some would like there to be no distinction made between economic migrants and refugees, but that can only ill serve those most at risk. As The Economist put it with commendable clarity this week when arguing for the screening of asylum applicants, “Syria is a hell-hole; Albania is not.” Blurring the distinction only makes it easier for political leaders, and the voters to whom they answer, to shrug off responsibility for helping those in genuine need. Thus can politicians get away with talking of “swarms” and “hordes”, language that dehumanises folk and allows them to be thought of, and dismissed, as a faceless mass of sharp-elbowed fortune seekers.

Aylan Kurdi, his brother Galin, and their mother, were as far away from fortune seekers as it is possible to venture. They were people in desperate need of a safe haven and there should have been a system in place to ensure they were at the front of the queue instead of being forced to take their chances with the people smugglers. It was reported yesterday that the Kurdis’ longed for destination was not the EU but Canada, a country that had previously turned down their application; a reminder, if one was needed, that the problem of displaced people is a global one.

Once it is accepted which cases should have priority, the rest is logistics and leadership. On both counts it is not just certain European nations that are failing on the job. The European Commission appears well-meaning but feeble, almost stunned into inaction, as if this crisis had blown up out of nowhere instead of being the result of wars that have been going on for years, four in the case of Syria. Instead of providing co-ordinated help, Europe has left it to charities, individual nations, and ordinary citizens to offer what they can, a tent or a hostel bed here, a bottle of water there. Is this is the best the world’s largest trading bloc can do?

The logistics of setting up a system so that applications can be dealt with closer to home, or in centres where people are treated in a respectful way, is not beyond the EU. The next question, that of leadership, is more troublesome. Coming under pressure from some of its own MPs, the UK Government yesterday defended what it was doing on Syria, taking in some people (5,000 have been given asylum since 2011) and sending humanitarian aid. But it has promised to keep the matter “under review”. That is of little to no comfort to those stuck in camps or making the long, perilous, expensive journey to the EU’s borders. Other EU countries will doubtless take their own paths, and they should pay the penalties for doing so. It ought to be made clear that no country can take from the EU with both hands and turn its back when crisis hits. Here, though, the time for such babble as “keeping matters under review” is over.

That rare commodity in politics known as plain speaking was in evidence yesterday at Holyrood when Nicola Sturgeon, said she had been moved to tears by the pictures of Aylan Kurdi’s body on the beach. Scotland, said the First Minister, stood ready to do everything possible to help. A summit is to take place today.

There will be some who argue that, with no control over borders or immigration, there is nothing Scotland can do independently and fundamentally to resolve this crisis. As with the rest of the UK, we are but a voice amid the clamour, albeit one that grows louder by the day. Be that as it may, we should speak up. We must speak up. If only for those who no longer can.