Encoding in JDBC:Sqlite

i have

    Class.forName("org.sqlite.JDBC");
    Properties properties = new Properties();
    properties.setProperty("characterEncoding", "UTF-8");
    properties.setProperty("encoding", "\"UTF-8\"");
    Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:sqlite:cities.db", properties);
    Statement stat = conn.createStatement();

    ResultSet rs = stat.executeQuery("select * from cities;");+

    while (rs.next()) {
        byte[] bytes = rs.getBytes("country");
        String country = new String(bytes, "utf-8");
        System.out.println(country);
    }

    rs.close();
    conn.close();

My output shows � for characters like ä,ö,ü.

if i run sqlite3 file from command line, and query the table from there, the characters are fine...

"pragma encoding;" shows utf-8...

if i debug, the bytes array has "-127" at the place of "ü"...

how to fix that? what could cause that problem?