bug report: UTF-8 encoding support

Dear fellow developers, I am using Xemacs 21.5.17 beta "chayote" on Windows XP, and the SINGLE MAJOR PROBLEM for me is the lame support for UTF-8 encoding. I live in Latvia and I use UTF-8 latvian diacritical characters all the time. However, Xemacs only recognizes file encoding as UTF-8 if there are first 2 UTF-8 bytes set at the beginning of file, or if there are already latvian UTF-8 encoded characters in the file. Otherwise, when I create a new file, or add a diacritical letter to existing UTF-8 file, there is no way for me to switch Xemacs encoding mode to UTF-8. The only thing that I learned to work around this is "save the file as UTF-8" in Notepad, which inserts UTF-8 prefix characters at the beginning of the file, after which Xemacs recognizes the file as UTF-8. Would anyone, please, make a simple Xemacs function to switch the file encoding to UTF-8, or, even better, to make UTF-8 default encoding for all files? Regards, Eduard