I think it's best to list what I've done in my configuration, and you can compare notes. I see all the UTF-8 fonts displayed correctly.
- install locales
#apt-get install locales
- Look in /etc/locale.gen for your locale encoding and uncomment that line. For example, I want to enable US locale, so this line is uncommented:
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
- generate locale
# locale-gen
- install unicode fonts
# apt-get install xfonts-efont-unicode
- set UTF-8 for root user in home directory
# cat ~/.utf8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
- make sure it's in the root user profile
# cat .profile
. ~/.utf8