[Orgmode] Emacs 21 doesn't pick utf-8 as the coding system

[Steinar Bang]

I'm trying to work on a file created on emacs 22 on Debian lenny, on
emacs 21 on RHEL4.  The org file in emacs 21 shows up with UTF-8
interpreted as iso-8859-1.

I've tried setting the coding explicitly with
 `C-x RET f utf-8-unix RET'
but that didn't seem to make any difference.

Are there lisp and mode-specific ways of fixing this? I'd rather not
mess with the locale settings...

Here are the locale settings:

On RHEL4:
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE=POSIX
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=

On debian lenny:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=POSIX
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=